Compare and contrast

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow compared and contrasted with Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

Irving portrays a more storybookish style town that is Sleepy Hollow.  Everybody is superstitious and they believe in supernatural occurrences.  And everything seems like a play.  Bierce’s story takes place in one spot, on a bridge.  It is not romanticized at all and nothing supernatural happens. 

In Irving’s story the protagonist is the tall skinny wimp that is Ichabod Crane.  He is a new resident to the town of Sleepy Hollow and works as a school teacher.  The antagonist is Brom, a muscular tall obnoxious show-off, and he does not like Ichabod.  In Bierce’s story, the protagonist is Peyton.  He is a farmer from a respected family, but has violated and broken the law and is about to get hung for it.  The antagonist(s) could be the soldiers who are executing him and enforcing the law that says he would be killed in the first place, or it could be death itself which he spends part of the story trying to escape. 

In Irving’s story, Ichabod is coming home late one night from a party and is chased by a headless horseman, then mysteriously disappears.  It is unclear whether or not the horseman was Brom trying to get rid of Ichabod, or if it was a supernatural being.  You also don’t know for sure what becomes of Ichabod.  He completely vanished and you hear rumors later that he didn’t die and is living somewhere else.  In Bierce’s story, it seems as if Peyton is dropped from the bridge to hang but the rope breaks, and he struggles but eventually succeeds to remove the noose from his neck.  He makes his way through the woods back to his house, and the descriptions of everything around this part of the story seem to get stranger.  He finds his house and as he’s about to embrace his wife who comes out to meet him, his neck breaks, and he dies.  This was a nice twist ending I think.  You know for sure that he is dead and that his escape was a hallucination. 

Both of these stories are short and written by American authors. 

Both are very enjoyable to read, in my opinion. 

The parts near the end of each book are both mysterious in that in Irving’s story Ichabod gets chased by the headless horseman and mysteriously disappears, and Peyton’s surroundings while he is making his way back to his house start to seem surreal. 

Both main characters had negative consequences based on their actions, Peyton’s being trying to sabotage Owl Creek Bridge, and Ichabod’s taking an interest in a girl Brom was also interested in (assuming the headless horseman was Brom). 

Thinking question

"From this state he was awakened -- ages later, it seemed to him -- by the pain of a sharp pressure upon his throat, followed by a sense of suffocation. Keen, poignant agonies seemed to shoot from his neck downward through every fiber of his body and limbs. These pains appeared to flash along well defined lines of ramification and to beat with an inconceivably rapid periodicity. They seemed like streams of pulsating fire heating him to an intolerable temperature. As to his head, he was conscious of nothing but a feeling of fullness -- of congestion. These sensations were unaccompanied by thought. The intellectual part of his nature was already effaced; he had power only to feel, and feeling was torment."
 I thought this is a good description of what suffocating while hanging by one's neck would feel like. Bierce did a good job and gave good details on exactly what the pain would feel like. He also gave a good description of what a hallucination induced by lack of oxygen would be like. What I wonder is if he just came up with that on his own. How would he know if someone would hallucinate if they were hung? How could He know that a hallucination would seem so long in such a short amount of time? Why did Bierce add the hallucination in in the first place, was it because he wanted to try to show the reader what a hallucination would be like or was it to give the reader a false sense of relief? I personally think it's the latter.

line illuminator

"All that day he traveled, laying his course by the rounding sun. The forest seemed interminable; nowhere did he discover a break in it, not even a woodman's road. He had not known that he lived in so wild a region. There was something uncanny in the revelation.
By nightfall he was fatigued, footsore, famishing. The thought of his wife and children urged him on. At last he found a road which led him in what he knew to be the right direction. It was as wide and straight as a city street, yet it seemed untraveled. No fields bordered it, no dwelling anywhere. Not so much as the barking of a dog suggested human habitation. The black bodies of the trees formed a straight wall on both sides, terminating on the horizon in a point, like a diagram in a lesson in perspective. Overhead, as he looked up through this rift in the wood, shone great garden stars looking unfamiliar and grouped in strange constellations. He was sure they were arranged in some order which had a secret and malign significance. The wood on either side was full of singular noises, among which--once, twice, and again--he distinctly heard whispers in an unknown tongue.
His neck was in pain and lifting his hand to it found it horribly swollen. He knew that it had a circle of black where the rope had bruised it. His eyes felt congested; he could no longer close them. His tongue was swollen with thirst; he relieved its fever by thrusting it forward from between his teeth into the cold air. How softly the turf had carpeted the untraveled avenue--he could no longer feel the roadway beneath his feet!
Doubtless, despite his suffering, he had fallen asleep while walking, for now he sees another scene--perhaps he has merely recovered from a delirium. He stands at the gate of his own home. All is as he left it, and all bright and beautiful in the morning sunshine. He must have traveled the entire night. As he pushes open the gate and passes up the wide white walk, he sees a flutter of female garments; his wife, looking fresh and cool and sweet, steps down from the veranda to meet him. At the bottom of the steps she stands waiting, with a smile of ineffable joy, an attitude of matchless grace and dignity. Ah, how beautiful she is! He springs forward with extended arms."

Everything up until this point in the story was realistic and very believable.  When this section starts to describe his surroundings as he is traveling, it seems kind of surreal and it seems like something was a little off--like the seemingly endless dense trees, there not being animals or people, him hearing strange voices.  And he doesn't recognize the stars.  This was a great build-up to his death, which I had not expected at all.  These were all great hints as to what was coming--the reveal that all this was a hallucination because his brain was being deprived of oxygen.  Right as he is about to embrace his wife, after the passage above, his neck breaks--he feels a horrible pain, everything goes white--all he felt of reality was the instant his neck broke and he died. 

I am looking forward to reading An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.