AOAOCB

"An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" is the heart warming story of how Mr. Farquhar unknowingly helps a union spy and is then sentenced to death, but while being hanged he gets the opportunity to escape, which he does, then he runs all the way home and then is hung because he never really escaped because it was all in his head.That said I now need to compare and or contrast the philosophies of this story to those of Emerson and or Thoreau. To start off I will state that Thoreau likes self worth and small government as can be seen in this statement from his "Civil Disobedience" "That government is best which governs least" (Thoreau). That is about the eight maybe even ninth time that I have used that quote in a blog and it is tiring me to a great extent. Anyways this story does not have much of stance on government as it simply doesn't, but I can pull a side of self worth out of the text in this thing that will help me to prove my point. As I stated early in a similar way but not the same way I am going to now, the story is about how one guy is able to think that he had the self worth to escape his captors and eminent death and flee to the place he desired most, which happens to have been his house which ironically is where the Union spy tricked him into helping him which is why he was being executed in the first place, which I see as a bit of an over reaction as he did not intentionally help the enemy. That is about the only thing that I could find to be similar in the aspect of the philosophies of those two people that I mentioned earlier that. The story doesn't seem to have the qualities of small government that is commonly seen in Thoreau's writings.

"Thoreau's Civil Disobedience - 1." The Thoreau Reader. Web. 07 Feb. 2012.
"Fiction: An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge." Fiction: Welcome to The EServer's Fiction Collection. Web. 16 Feb. 2012.