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).