Re: searching for the origin of a story

On Mar 1, 3:57 am, Sebastian Kempke <Sebast...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
shawnmgarr...@xxxxxxxxxxxxx schrieb:





First - re: SPOILERS - anyone who read the first entry of this post
and continued reading the responses should have no right to complain.
You dont want to know - don't read the responses! I'd be interested in
actually reading valid responses to the question because I'm pretty
sure I'm not going to remember the particular title of a story within,
say, 2 weeks from reading this thread, if that!

Second - I don't want to post a replay yet because I'd like the
question clarified - are you looking for stories in which,
specifically, a ghost-hunter turns out to be a ghost themselves (if
not *the* ghost)? Or are you just looking for stories in which the
narrative trick (I don't use that word in a negative sense) is that
the narrator is dead and doesn't realize it (and maybe nevver realizes
it, although the reader does). If it's the latter than certainly we
can set the bar at 1890 and Bierce's "Occurence At Owl Creek Bridge"
and work back from there, right?

Yes, "The Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge" by Ambrose Bierbe is exactly
the type of story I've been looking for. I read it a few years ago and
now that you mentioned it, it all came back to me. An obvious starting
point for a more thorough search for stories like these. Sheesh, I feel
a little stupid now, so, thanks for the tip.

It seems to me that "Owl Creek Bridge" doesn't represent the sort of
story you were asking about in your original post--it deals with an
experience at (or just before) the moment of death, not with a person
who *is* dead without realizing it.

That said, after spending a little time with the not-entirely-
satisfactory motif index in Bleiler's *Guide to Supernatural Fiction*,
I came up with the following list of stories that feature characters
unaware of their own death. (I say "not entirely satisfactory" because
Bleiler omits some stories that seem to me to include such characters--
such as Charles Williams's *All Hallows Eve* and Graham Greene's "A
Little Place off the Edgeware Road" and the one that Mr. Campbell
referred to upthread--even though these are included in the volume's
main entries.) I can't personally vouch for all of them, since there
are some I haven't read.

Nugent Barker, "Whessoe" (?)
Algernon Blackwood, "Transition" (1917)
Margery Bowen, "The Accident" (1927)
Hugh B. Cave, "Tomorrow Is Forever" (1943)
Arthur Conan Doyle, "How It Happened" (1913)
William C. Morrow, "Over an Absinthe Bottle" (1897)
Barry Pain, "This Is All" (1901)
Laurence Whistler, "Captain Dalgety Returns" (1952)

There are certainly others--in commenting on the Doyle story listed
above, B. refers to it as a "trite theme."

In addition, here are the stories he indexes as making use of the Owl
Creek Bridge motif (other than Bierce's story itself):

Robert W. Chambers, "The Key to Grief" (1897)
Daphne Du Maurier, "The Split Second" (1952)
"Ex-Private X" [A. M. Burrage], "The Cottage in the Wood" (1931)
"G. Garnett" [Irvin Ashkenasy], "The Headless Miller of Kobold's
Keep" (1937)
Robert Nathan, *But Gently Day* (1943) [a personal favorite of mine]
Leo Perutz, *From Nine to Nine* (1918)

Again, this list is hardly exhaustive.


RPN

.

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