A prominent motif throughout the story is the color gray, which serves as a representation of the violence and death that come along with war. One example comes in the flashback that describes the soldier approaching Farquhar’s home:
One evening while Farquhar and his wife were sitting on a rustic bench near the entrance to his grounds, a gray-clad soldier rode up to the gate and asked for a drink of water.
Pretending to be a Confederate soldier, this Union soldier approaches Farquhar with a trap, leading him to attempt to take back the Owl Creek bridge and ultimately fail. The only description of the soldier in this section is that he is “gray-clad”—that is, wearing gray clothing. This gray-clad soldier effectively leads Farquhar to his end. Not only does the color gray become associated with death, then, but it is also a symbol of the Confederacy, as the soldier is wearing the uniform of a Confederate to convince Farquhar to foolishly go to his death. Therefore, the motif equates death and violence with the Confederacy, hinting at Bierce’s opinions and motivation in writing this story.
The color gray is also mentioned when Farquhar imagines escaping in the third section with a heightened and distorted perception of the world around him. While swimming in the river, Bierce writes:
He looked at the forest on the bank of the stream, saw the individual trees, the leaves and the veining of each leaf — saw the very insects upon them: the locusts, the brilliant-bodied flies, the gray spiders stretching their webs from twig to twig.
From his distorted perception, Farquhar specifically notes that the spiders are gray. This detail is deliberate, especially given that none of the previous insects mentioned are given a color. These gray spiders are making webs like the trap that was set for Farquhar by the “gray-clad soldier,” similarly signifying imminent death.
Finally, in the third section, Bierce describes one of the soldiers as having gray eyes:
The man in the water saw the eye of the man on the bridge gazing into his own through the sights of the rifle. He observed that it was a gray eye and remembered having read that gray eyes were keenest, and that all famous marksmen had them. Nevertheless, this one had missed.
Here, the gray eye is explicitly a representation of violence: Bierce writes that “gray eyes were the keenest” and “all famous marksmen had them.” Not only does this detail hint at Farquhar’s distorted perception (he contemplates the eyes of the guard shooting at him instead of frantically escaping), but it further associates gray with death. The fact that this gray-eyed marksman missed his shot indicates that Farquhar’s perception is not real and foreshadows that death will ultimately claim him.
