Notes

More About Ambrose Bierce

Bierce’s service during the Civil War also influenced his writing. Bierce composed unflinching war stories, describing in detail the horrors and brave acts he witnessed. Often, his third-person narration combined the tone of a reporter with a sense of mystery to create a new kind of ghost story.

…the horseman saw the footman clearly, in a patch of white light. It was Trooper Dunning, unarmed and bareheaded. The object at his feet resolved itself into a dead horse, and at a right angle across the animal's neck lay a dead man, face upward in the moonlight.

— Ambrose Bierce, "A Baffled Ambuscade"1
In 1913, at age 70, Bierce began a strange journey. He revisited the battlefields where he’d fought, traveled to the various cities in which he’d lived, then he headed to Mexico to join the revolutionary army headed by the controversial Pancho Villa. He disappeared while in Mexico and is thought to have died there in 1914.
Fortunately, Ambrose Bierce’s writing has not disappeared. Let’s see how a master controls third-person narrative to create suspense.



Objectives

Recognize the effect of third-person point of view on the telling of a story.
Define vocabulary relevant to the reading.
Read and demonstrate comprehension of Ambrose Bierce's "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge."
Demonstrate an understanding of the process essay.
1. Ambrose Bierce, "A Baffled Ambuscade" in The Complete Short Stories of Ambrose Bierce: Volume II: The World of War and the World of Tall Tales, ed. Ernest Jerome Hopkins (New York: Ballantine Books, 1970), 19-21.