An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge

The main character is Peyton Farquhar who is a wealthy planter in Alabama. The story goes into great depths talking all about the character of Peyton Farquhar. He was a slave owner as well as a southern sympathizer. I know that there were many people on both sides of the Civil War who tried to fool people form the other side and get them to do things that would cause them to get caught. The North ended up winning the war and slavery was ended. When I read this story I thought about what it must have felt like to be Peyton standing on the bridge knowing that he was about to die. I was suprised by how Ambrose Bierce went through telling about how the man could get away and leading the reader to think that he survived just to say that the man died at the end. If I was caught by an enemy army and put on a bridge about to die I think I would be scared out of my mind I would try to think out of any way to get out of there.

"N" Word being removed from "Huckleberry Finn"

I do not think that the "N" word should be removed from "Huckleberry Finn" by Mark Twain. If you remove this word and change it to the word "slave" it will change the whole meaning of the story. Jim was not a slave he was in fact a free man so calling him a slave would not be right. Mark Twain wrote in the dialect of his time and it was socially excepted to call African Americans by the "N" word during that time. By changing Twain's words you are changing what people get out of the book. Even if the "N" word is changed to slaves so that it can be used in schools a teacher should be responsible enough to tell their students that the word had been changed. I think that the book can be taught without the changes in a high school setting. Last year I read "Huckleberry Finn" in my junior English class. Before we started reading my teacher had a talk with the class about how the "N" word was used back then and what the word really means. She told us that at the time the book was written it was socially acceptable to use the "N" word.