One of the most interesting works, not only in this period, is An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge by Ambrose Bierce. In this most unsettling work Bierce portrays the subjectivity of time, how the reader has no true control of time and must rely on the author to convey it. In the story, Peyton Farquhar has been discovered attempting to destroy a railroad line under the command of the Union army. His punishment will be swift: hanged from the bridge for aiding a war enemy. All the way through the story, the reader is led to believe that Peyton Farquhar manages to escape his captors under rather miraculous circumstances. The reader sees how he manages to break the rope that nearly choked him, free his hands underwater, and avoid the rifle fire long enough to touch land. Once in the river's shore he runs barefoot for a long distance until he reaches his tranquil estate and reaches for his wife's embrace. However "Peyton Farquhar was dead; his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of the Owl Creek bridge." This ending, after the expected shock, brings the question: was he only imagining all of it? Well, of course. On the last seconds before his death, Peyton's mind started to recede further, no doubt due to the great stress he was facing. In this moments, his mind devised a small escape from reality to cope with it. He then started to knit, moment by moment, sight by sight, a story, his wish. He succeeded. At least until he died. Time is truly relative to the observer, and, for Peyton Farquhar, he stretched it for as long as he could to delay his imminent demise. Besides the relativity of time, there are other interesting aspects of the story. The story changes points of view in the story. In the first part the omniscient narrator relates with cold, eerie exactitude the process by which Farquhar is soon to die. The detached narrator tells all the details: how Peyton is bound, ...