An Imprisoning Site of Passage: Symbolic and Physical Topography in Ambrose Bierce’s ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek’

This paper proposes to investigate how memories connected to landmarks of the American Civil War contributed to shape the eerily oneiric imagery in Ambrose Bierce’s short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” Viewing the eponymous trestle as a metaphorical and material site of passage, this study examines the story’s interplay between the semantics of wartime topography, the protagonist’s dream(e)scape, and Bierce’s own experiences of the Civil War as a soldier of the Union army. I maintain that the narrator’s unreliability, acting as a point of transition between multiple interpretations of the tale, diegetically reflects the physical and symbolic function of the bridge.