I’ve heard of Ambrose Bierce’s short story, but I don’t remember ever reading it. According to Wikipedia, “Kurt Vonnegut referred to ‘Occurrence’ in his book A Man Without a Country as one of the greatest works of American literature, and called anyone who hadn’t read it a ‘twerp’.”

I guess I just escaped twerpdom, thanks to LOST. In the second season episode entitled The Long Con, “Locke is shown holding this book (Occurrence) upside down, in the Swan, flipping through the pages as if he’s trying to find loose papers between them.” So, getting overly-analytical as I’m prone to do, I wonder what Occurrence has to do with LOST? (If you haven’t read the short story, there are spoilers ahead.)

In Bierce’s story, Peyton Farquhar is a Confederate sympathizer who falls into a Union trap and tries to burn down a bridge, Owl Creek Bridge. He’s about to be hanged from said bridge and in the brief interval between drop and death, he imagines that the rope breaks, he escapes, swims downriver, and returns to his home. Alas, the return home is only a figment of his imagination, and at the end of the story, Farquhar is dead; “his body, with a broken neck, swung gently from side to side beneath the timbers of Owl Creek Bridge.”

Bierce plays with Time in this story just as the writers of LOST play with Time and Space in their story. There’s also a possible analogy between Peyton Farquhar’s supposed escape from death and the near-miraculous escape of the LOST survivors. (People don’t usually survive in a plane that breaks in half in mid-air and falls from the sky.) Are they really dead, as Naomi indicated when she said that the plane had been found and the passengers mourned? Maybe they’re caught somewhere between the final moments of life and death, and the Island itself is just an illusion? In the story, Farquhar imagines an alternate series of events in which he escapes the noose, escapes the bullets of the Union soldiers, and returns home to his wife, and the reader is conned into thinking that the escape is real. It feels real in the story; the circumstances surrounding Farquhar’s escape are described vividly.

So, is LOST a “long con”? I don’t really think so, but if we find out at the end that everyone’s really dead, that the entire six seasons were only a brief imaginary interval, a great many viewers are going to be unhappy. People don’t like being swindled, even by such a handsome devil as Sawyer/James/Josh Holloway.

“Doubtless, despite his sufferings, he had fallen asleep while walking, for now he sees another scene—perhaps he has merely recovered from a delirium. He stands at the gate of his own home. All is as he left it, and all bright and beautiful in the morning sunshine. He must have travelled the entire night. . . . As he is about to clasp her he feels a stunning blow upon the back of the neck; a blinding white light blazes all about him with a sound like the shock of a cannon—then all is darkness and silence!”

Lostpedia on An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge.

Read Bierce’s story here.

More information about Semicolon’s LOST Reading project.