This story was first published in 1890, some 25 years after the end of the American Civil War. Though the story takes place during the time of the war, and though it presents a Southern plantation owner and secessionist who is wholly devoted to the Southern cause, it does not paint him as pure villain. In fact, Bierce gives the reader one major way in which to relate to Peyton Farquhar: all he wants is...
This story was first published in 1890, some 25 years after the end of the American Civil War. Though the story takes place during the time of the war, and though it presents a Southern plantation owner and secessionist who is wholly devoted to the Southern cause, it does not paint him as pure villain. In fact, Bierce gives the reader one major way in which to relate to Peyton Farquhar: all he wants is to escape his death sentence and return home to be with his wife and children. He wants this so much that he actually imagines, in the time it takes him to drop from the bridge into the noose, that he has almost achieved it. Farquhar isn't presented as particularly villainous at all (any details that would draw attention to his slave-ownership, for example, are left out of the story), but rather, he seems like a pretty normal guy with pretty normal hopes. Therefore, the story seems to focus, not on the villainy of the South or the horrors of slavery as earlier literature was more apt to do, but on the civilian toll, the other costs, of war. Bierce almost seems to encourage us to feel sympathetically for Farquhar in the end, his neck snapped by the noose just as he feels he's about to embrace his wife. Such a position is indicative of the story's relation to its time. The emotions that ran high during and immediately after the Civil War have had time to cool, and people have become more able to see war, in general, as a real evil.
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