The eighteenth-century man of letters Samuel Johnson once observed that when a man knows he is to be hanged in a fortnight, it concentrates his mind wonderfully. But what lifts Bierce’s writing to new heights is the sheer length of his description, particularly in the third section of ‘An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge’. We find similar moments in the works of Poe and Dickens: the latter’s description of Fagin’s worried mind as he waits to be sentenced to hanging at the end of Oliver Twist would make for an interesting comparative analysis between Bierce’s story and Dickens’s description of the psychology of a condemned man.
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