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Shannon Earnhart
Dr. Marie Guthrie
ENG 390/BG/9:10
March 25, 2011
Comparison of Poe’s “The Black Cat” and Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”
There are several striking similarities between Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Black Cat” and
Ambrose Bierce’s “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.” In the separate stories, each author
employs the element of nature to provide backdrop, as well as a central role. Likewise, danger
and poetic justice are key components to the tone of both narratives. Furthermore, each piece
demonstrates the use of literary psychology, the development of which Poe and Bierce are
considered pioneers. Similar symbols, reoccurring themes, and literary devices are employed to
bring the individual stories to their surprise endings.
Poe and Bierce present the protagonists of their individual stories as anti-heroes. Both
men are facing death by hanging and owe their predicament to foolhardy, reckless choices. Poe’s
protagonist does not even garner a name while Bierce’s is dressed in a “well-fitting frock coat”
as he is about to be hanged (Bierce 1477). Peyton Farquhar embodies the quintessence of the
southern gentleman. The reader is left to infer he came to his demise in an attempt to sabotage
the Owl Creek Bridge. Poe’s main character declares himself, “mad I am not,” although the
circumstances of the story prove otherwise (Poe 750). A series of rash, malicious, and violent
actions lead both protagonists to their impending doom. Both men are criminals according to the
law, yet both rationalize their actions throughout their narratives.
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The natural realm plays a key role in both “The Black Cat” and “An Occurrence at Owl
Creek Bridge.” In “The Black Cat,” the natural element is represented by the pets the narrator
accumulates, most notably, the black cat, Pluto, and later, the mysterious black cat. “We had
birds, gold-fish, a fine dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat” (Poe 706). The felines in the
story act as the antagonist to the anti-hero. Similarly, in “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,”
the Owl Creek figures prominently into the action. In section three, our protagonist battles the
Owl Creek as one of the major forces attempting to take his life. “The noose about his neck was
already suffocating him and kept the water from his lungs. To die of hanging at the bottom of a
river! – the idea to him seemed ludicrous” (Bierce 1479). Bierce uses the natural elements of
light and dark to symbolize life and death. “He opened his eyes to the darkness and saw above
him a gleam of light, but how distant, how inaccessible” (Bierce 1479). Sunlight is employed to
represent the walk of life in light and Farquhar’s glorious homecoming with his wife. Bierce
juxtaposes this with the darkness in which Farquhar is jerked back to reality and ultimately,
death. “Then all is darkness and silence” (Bierce 1482).
Maliciousness, violence, and danger characterize the action in both stories. Poe escalates
his tale beginning with the narrator’s gradual development of animal cruelty and spousal abuse
attributed to alcohol. His violence, of which he voices remorse, moves from gouging out Pluto’s
eye to hanging the cat from a tree. On the night of the hanging, the narrator and his wife barely
escape with their lives as the house burns to the ground. The arrival of a mysterious black cat
brings the narrator to a tortured guilt which culminates in his sinking an axe into his wife’s head.
Bierce’s narration in the third section leads Farquhar from swinging on the end of the rope over
the Owl Creek to plunging twenty feet into the water. In his fantasy, Farquhar avoids drowning,
cannon fire, and gunshot in a struggle to make it to shore.
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Tied to the danger is the morality of poetic justice. In both narratives, the protagonists
pay for their crimes in a death by hanging. Poe’s narrator is met with the same fate he imposed
upon his beloved pet. In a like manner, Bierce’s Farquhar is hung from the very bridge he was
attempting to destroy.
Part of the intelligence of the piece which lends itself to the overall psychology is the way
each author paces the story. Worthy of note is the penchant both authors exhibit for the use of
dashes and exclamation marks. These grammatical devices lend themselves to the urgency and
frenzied tone of each story. Poe begins with the imminent hanging of the narrator. The remainder
of the story is told in a fluid, fast paced flashback. The plot moves at a swift clip only focusing
on the details which tell the story quickly. Pluto and the other black cat are the only characters
described with an appreciable amount of physical detail. The reader is left to make up a great
deal of scenery in their own head, yet, the narration is vivid and a picture does form.
In a similar vein, Bierce begins with the actual hanging of his main character. The
remainder of this story is flashback followed by an imagined reality. Bierce blurs the line of
time. An example of this is the way in which the water of the Owl Creek is described:
He looked a moment at his ‘unsteadfast footing,’ then let his gaze wander to the
swirling water of the stream racing madly beneath his feet. A piece of dancing driftwood
caught his attention and his eyes followed it down the current. How slowly it appeared to
move! What a sluggish stream! (Bierce 1477).
The reader can see how rapidly the water goes from “racing madly” to a “sluggish stream.”
Another example is the slowing of Farquhar’s timepiece right before his hanging. “With greater
infrequency the sounds increased in strength and sharpness. They hurt his ear like the thrust of a
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knife; he feared he would shriek. What he heard was the ticking of his watch” (Bierce 1478). The
timepiece is symbolic of the limited time Farquhar has remaining, the desire to shout out against
it, and the ability of the mind to play a series of events in a split second.
Another component of the overall psychology of “The Black Cat” and “An Occurrence
an Owl Creek Bridge,” is the symbolic use of color. Obviously, the color black is dominant in
Poe’s story. The narrator, in describing the cat, references his wife “who at heart was not a little
tinctured with superstition, made frequent allusions to the ancient popular notion, which regarded
all black cats as witches in disguise” (Poe 706). Black is symbolic of evil and the narrator’s
descent into madness. By comparison, Bierce uses the color gray; it is deliberately placed
throughout. It is the color of both Peyton Farquhar’s and the Federal marksman’s eyes. Farquhar
sees the marksman’s eye through his rifle site and observes, “it was a gray eye and remembered
having read that gray eyes were keenest, and that all famous marksmen had them” (Bierce 1480).
Gray here not only represents the blurred line between the fact and fantasy in the story, but, also
provides some commentary on Farquhar. Bierce highlights Farquhar’s vanity and
shortsightedness and further connects him to the same qualities of the Confederate cause which
is also represented by the color gray. In both the case of Farquhar and the Confederacy, the
shortsightedness of their foolish plans leads to their demise.
Poe and Bierce also make veiled commentary on the holy state of matrimony. Both
authors fail to give either woman a name or physical descriptions. Only their individual actions
are related to the reader along with their individual husband’s claim of undying love. Poe paints
the wife of the narrator as a woman who indulges her husband’s love of pets and is an animal
lover herself. She is an “uncomplaining wife, alas! was the most usual and patient of sufferers”
(Poe 709). She remains with a husband who physically abuses her and stays the narrator’s hand
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when he attempts to kill the mysterious black cat with an axe. This action leads to her death as
the narrator is, “goaded, by the interference, into a rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew my
arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot, without a groan”
(Poe 710). Even in death she was uncomplaining. The narrator claims great love for his wife yet
he beats her, murders her, treats her body with disrespect by concealing it within the basement
wall, and delights is the prospect of getting away with her murder. This tale is more than a
macabre story about a reincarnated cat. It is a story about how an abusive madman is brought to
justice by the cries of a cat. “I was answered by a voice from within the tomb! – by a cry, at first
muffled and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud,
and continuous scream” (Poe 711). Poe gives voice to the woman who suffered in silence
through the shriek of a cat.
Bierce, in comparison, treats Farquhar’s wife in the same manner, seen, but not heard.
“Mrs. Farquhar was only too happy to serve him with her own white hands” (Bierce 1478).
Bierce’s wording here indicts her as a daughter of the South, a belle who will only fetch water
for a white man. Farquhar’s only wish is to return to his wife while he is surrounded by the
hangman’s noose, yet he foolishly abandoned her in his quest for glory. Farquhar is
representative of the men of the South who abandoned their genteel wives and set out on a fool’s
errand of blowing up a few bridges, tearing families and a country apart in the process.
The anti-heroes in these stories are indeed mad. Poe’s narrator chronicles a tale he does
not anticipate or need the reader to believe. “Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where
my senses reject their own evidence” (Poe 705). He often refers to his feelings about the
mysterious black cat as a “phantasm” (Poe 708). The narrator has a proclivity for torturing
animals, an indicator determined by modern psychology of a person’s likelihood to develop
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homicidal tendencies. The narrator lays blame to “the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me
into murder” and refers to the cat as “the monster” (Poe 711). The true monster of the story, of
course, is the narrator who will soon meet his end with a noose around his neck.
Peyton Farquhar’s madness is evidenced by his impulsive decision to try to burn down
the Owl Creek Bridge, a decision he makes conferencing with the duplicitous Northern scout
disguised as a Confederate soldier. His final break with reality occurs at his hanging. He engages
his mind in a fantastical escape from his executioners only to be brought back to reality with the
jerking of his neck in the noose. “Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck,
swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge” (Bierce 1482).
Written half a century apart, “The Black Cat” and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”
are enduring classics of suspense. These seemingly different stories have many similarities. Each
story is multilayered and populated with symbolic meaning and psychological turmoil. The main
character anti-heroes expose the foolhardy and malicious side of human nature. Color, nature,
domesticity, and rope tie together these stories of poetic justice.
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Works Cited
Bierce, Ambrose. "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." Norton anthology american literature:
shorter. [S.l.]: W W Norton & Co Inc, 2007.
Poe, Edgar A. "The Black Cat." Norton anthology american literature: shorter. [S.l.]: W W
Norton & Co Inc, 2007.