However, that detached tone gradually shifts. The context is developed gradually, with reference to ‘the Federal army’ and the military lexis of ‘stockade’, ‘rifles’, ‘embrasure’, ‘sword’ and ‘muzzle of a brass cannon’. The reader has to wait until the second sentence to realise his predicament, with ‘wrists bound with a cord’ and a rope which ‘encircled his neck.’ His executioners too are described in the same unemotional detached manner, as if interpreting events from the standpoint of military observation. The first section employs a detached narrative point of view, observing a man on a bridge. The story is structured in three distinct stages to give the reader different perspectives of Peyton Farquhar before the story’s surprise twist at the end. Bierce, himself a veteran of the American Civil War fighting on the Unionist side, uses that historical setting in a number of his short stories, of which An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge is perhaps the most famous.
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