It is not only the narrator who experiences the story but also the readers themselves. As he himself once put it, Bierce detested "bad readers—readers who, lacking the habit of analysis, lack also the faculty of discrimination, and take whatever is put before them, with the broad, blind catholicity of a slop-fed conscience of a parlor pig".Prattle, The San Francisco Argonaut, 22 June 1878, as quoted in F.J. Logan The Wry Seriousness of Owl Creek Bridge in: American Literary Realism, 10, No. 2 (Spring 1977), pp. 101–13.
