Sucker, An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, and The Sniper

            I have read An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, Sucker, and The Sniper.  Each of these stories talks a lot about death or something life changing and how it affects people in different situations.  This would vary depending on the time period and the situation that people are in. 

            The time period greatly affects the reactions to life changing events and how life-changing events occur.  During the civil war, death and life changing things would happen much more often than in a setting that is not as violent and unpredictable.  In a modern time when there is always the question of who you killed and how they relate to you.  In The Sniper, the young man wonders who he has killed and risks his life just to see who he killed. He ended up finding that he killed his brother, so it may just be in that situation.  In modern areas where there is no war, there is still a way to harm people with words and actions, rather than guns and weapons.  In Sucker, the boy and his cousin were best friends until they got in a fight and they said things that were so hurtful that they damaged the relationship they had forever. 

            The way people accept life changing events and death vary according to the situation that they are in.  In really bad situations where there is war or diseases, death is not as uncommon as it would be in a peaceful community where there is not a lot of fighting or death.  In An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge and The Sniper, the main characters that have occurrences with death or near death are both during times of civil war and get caught at the wrong place at the wrong time.  In An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge, the man had been tricked and caught by the enemy soldiers during the Civil War.  In The Sniper, the young man is on “guard duty” and was in a one-on-one gunfight with a man on the enemy side.  The man turned out to be his brother.  In both situations, both men accepted death pretty well.  One had a flashback/ fantasy of himself getting away to his wife and children, where as the other just looked down into the face of his brother.  Both were sad events, but taken well.  In Sucker, the boys get into a fight that leaves one of them wanting to kill the other.  When someone you love makes this kind of wound, just saying, “I’ m sorry” doesn’t fix it. 

            The situations and the time periods of life changing events effect the reaction of people that they happened to and the overall community of a family or group of people.