The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a work of fiction. The bridge collapse in Lima, Peru, at noon on Friday, July 20, 1714, never happened, although it is a perfectly plausible invention. The bridge in the novel “is based on the great Inca road suspension bridge across the Apurímac River, erected around 1350, still in use in 1864” (Wikipedia). Wilder did not visit Peru before writing this novel.
Brother Juniper’s investigation into the lives of the five victims, intended to reinforce faith by proving that the end of a person’s life is all part of God’s plan for that person, has the opposite effect. What he discovers is that each of those who die has sought love and fulfillment in their lives but that each has (in his or her own different way) failed to reach their goals. However, each is beginning life afresh on the day that they die. Thus, their deaths make no sense. For this reason, both Juniper and his book are found heretical and both are burned in the public square. However, the reader also learns that their deaths in the bridge tragedy inspire some of those who they leave behind to a more meaningful life. Thus, the novel is deliberately ambiguous about whether the fall of the bridge is a random accident or an example of divine intention.
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Normally, it is possible to list a number of different themes in a work of fiction, but in the case of this short novel everything is a variation on one theme: the quest to understand the nature of human life, mortality, and the existence (or not) of a divine will. This alerts us to the fact that this is a philosophical novel. As Russell Banks writes in the Foreword to The Bridge of San Luis Rey:
One merely has to consider the central question raised by the novel, which, according to Wilder himself, was simply: “Is there a direction and meaning in the lives beyond the individual’s own will?” It is perhaps the largest and most profoundly personal philosophical inquiry that we can undertake. It is the question that defines us as human beings. (Wilder)
If Banks is right in arguing that the novel is “as close to perfect a moral fable as we are ever likely to get in American literature” (Wilder), then it needs to be added that it is a fable which does not explicitly have a moral. Wilder himself wrote that:
God’s love has to transcend his just retribution. But in my novel I have left this question unanswered. As I said earlier, we can only pose the question correctly and clearly, and have faith one will ask the question in the right way. (Thornton Wilder)
The reader is left to decide for him/herself. Wilder commented wryly on this freedom when he told an interviewer:
Many assured me that The Bridge of San Luis Rey was a satisfying demonstration that all the accidents of life were overseen and harmonized in providence; and a society of atheists in New York wrote me that it was the most artful exposure of shallow optimisms since Candide and asked me to address them. (The Paris Review)
Coincidence plays such a dominant role in the narrative that even the narrator is driven to speculate that the events recorded are not coincidental at all but the work of “some Intention,” that is of a controlling deity. The most obvious examples of apparent coincidence are: the similarities in life-experience between the five randomly assembled victims of the bridge collapse. Five people step onto the San Luis Bridge at the same time: with the exception of two, they are entirely unknown to each other. They are, however, united by the fact that each has sought love in his/her life but has been denied it; each is in the process of trying to find the love that has evaded them. The other apparent coincidence is that the accident is witnessed by Brother Juniper who is perhaps the only man who could have undertaken to investigate, interpret and chronicle the event.
On the other hand, the absurd accident that kills five ‘innocent’ people raises the question of whether human lives are controlled by an all-powerful and loving God or are rather the result of purely random forces. The writer Albert Camus defined the absurd as the mismatch in an individual’s consciousness between the assumptions upon which he/she has been living life and the reality of that life. Thus, the absurd rests neither in the world (which is irrational and random) nor in humans (who have an inherent need to find meaning), but rather in the confrontation or interface between the “unreasonable silence of the world” and man’s “wild longing for clarity” and order (The Myth of Sisyphus 28 and 21). This is precisely the dilemma raised by the collapse of the bridge.
Brother Juniper, as a man of faith, is convinced that God must have purpose behind His decisions, and that (being a benevolent God) He must inevitably favor the worthy people over the unworthy. If this is so, then the Brother is convinced that he should be able to measure, and thus demonstrate objectively, the influence of Divine Will upon human life. Before he witnesses the bridge collapse, he has been testing this hypothesis using a scale for measuring abstract moral values such as piety and goodness, and applying the scale both to people who have suffered from tragedy and those who have not. However, he has been unable to confirm his hypothesis. In fact, his research has tended to show that the unworthy have done better in life than the worthy by a ratio of five to one.
The deaths of just five individuals appears to offer the ideal opportunity to use scientific methods to answer the question, “Why did this thing happen to those five people?” and to determine finally whether “we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan” (7). He sets out an intellectual quest to prove that the deaths were the product of divine intervention. However, six years of research compiling vast amounts of data on these victims leaves the Brother unable to point to any moral fault that would mark these individuals for Divinely inspired tragedy. He is reduced to providing the required generalized orthodox conclusion that the fall of the bridge exemplified “pride and wealth confounded as an object lesson to the world, and humility crowned and rewarded for the edification of the city” (101). As punishment, Brother Juniper is excommunicated by the Church and burned for writing a book which set out to “justify the ways of God to man” (8) and failed to do so.
Not only is Brother Juniper’s scientific inquiry fruitless, but ironically he never lives to see that the deaths of the five do bring forth the love that was lacking in their lives. Having lost Uncle Pio and her son, Camila Perichole dedicates herself to the convent as a volunteer aiding the Abbess in her charity work; Doña Clara, who ignored her mother during her life, sails from Spain to mourn her passing; and the Abbess of the Convent of Santa Maria Rosa de la Rosas, having witnessed the change in these two, understands the importance of human love even “soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for a while and forgotten.”
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