Answer:
"His neck ached horribly; his brain was on fire, his heart, which had been fluttering faintly, gave a great leap, trying to force itself out at his mouth. His whole body was racked and wrenched with an insupportable anguish! But his disobedient hands gave no heed to the command."
Explanation:
<em>An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge</em> is a short story by Ambrose Bierce that revolves around the story of an accused man Peyton Farquhar and his dreamlike imagination during his actual execution. And during the small window of time, he had before he was actually hanged and died, his mind raced through a lot of imagination that seemed real and made him believe he had actually escaped his execution at the bridge.
Fluctuating between dream and reality, the plot moves back and forth between the two. While most of the plot, as we will come to realize in the end, stems from his imagination, there are also some real events happening or described in between. One such reality is in the third part of the story where the details of his 'escape' were described by Farquhar. His description gave the implication that after he reached the water, he strove hard to escape and free himself while in reality, his body was actually suffering from the pains of hanging and the constrictions that follow. This pain is revealed in the lines <em>"His neck ached horribly; his brain was on fire, his heart, which had been fluttering faintly, gave a great leap, trying to force itself out at his mouth. His whole body was racked and wrenched with an insupportable anguish!"</em> <u>This is actually the pain that follows the hanging and not the pain of trying to escape the water</u> (as thought by him).
