Wilderness in "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge"

            In “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” wilderness is portrayed in two contrasting ways:  as beautiful and sheltering on the one hand, and as a malevolent force that is out to get the main character, on the other.  Near the beginning of Peyton Farquhar’s dream of escape, when he first comes up out of the river for air, he perceives and appreciates the beauty of the natural world in extreme detail:  “He looked at the forest on the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves and the veining of each leaf – saw the very insects upon them:  the locusts, the brilliant-bodied flies, the grey spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig.” 

            Moments later in his dream, nature becomes Peyton’s enemy as he finds himself at the mercy of the river’s tumbling water, “…caught in a vortex…whirled on with a velocity of advance and gyration that made him giddy and sick.”  But just as quickly the river deposits him on a bank of sand and gravel, and once again the wilderness is benign and lovely:  “He dug his fingers into the sand, threw it over himself in handfuls and audibly blessed it.  It looked like diamonds, rubies, emeralds; he could think of nothing beautiful which it did not resemble.”

            To escape the gunfire from the Union soldiers Peyton plunges into the forest, where he is shielded and sheltered by the wilderness of trees.  But hours of walking without seeing any signs of human habitation make him uneasy:  “He had not known that he lived in so wild a region.  There was something uncanny in the revelation.”  This uneasiness grows as he begins to perceive the woods on either side of him as straight walls penning him in, and even the stars above “…arranged in some order which had a secret and malign significance.”  I think this is a foreshadowing of Peyton’s rapidly-approaching death, of the immutability of the laws of physics and the limitations of existence in a mortal body.