The real Owl Creek Bridge is in Tennessee. Bierce likely changed the setting to northern Alabama because the actual bridge did not have a railroad near it at the time of the story.[5]
The story explores the concept of "dying with dignity." It shows the reader that the perception of "dignity" provides no mitigation for the deaths that occur in warfare. It further demonstrates psychological escape right before death. Farquhar experiences an intense delusion to distract him from his inevitable death. The moment of horror that the reader experiences at the end of the piece reflects the distortion of reality that Farquhar encounters.[6]
It is not only the narrator who experiences the story but also the readers themselves. Bierce said that he detested "bad readers—readers who, lacking the habit of analysis, lack also the faculty of discrimination, and take whatever is put before them, with the broad, blind catholicity of a slop-fed conscience of a parlor pig."[7]
