Crossing the Bridge of San Luis Rey
“On a Friday afternoon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.”
Thus begins Brother Juniper’s quest to uncover whether divine intervention exists. The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder’s 1928 Pulitzer Prize novel, is a philosophical puzzle — an exploration into whether our lives are regulated by the dictates of divine fate or if life is pure chance, strung together by human choices. Although Wilder adheres to structural elements of morality stories, he denies the reader one of its core attributes — a clear answer. This ambiguity and search for an answer calls for the reader to actively engage with the story, puzzling their way through the intricacies of the characters’ lives and forcing them to draw conclusions about the very nature of human existence.
‘Why did this happen to those five?’
When five seemingly innocent people plunge to their deaths, one man sets out to discover why. “If there were any plan in the universe at all, if there were any pattern in a human life,” Brother Juniper reasons, “surely it could be discovered mysteriously latent in those lives so suddenly cut off.” We have two options, he decides:
“Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan.”
Armed with this prerequisite, Brother Juniper is determined to learn all he can about the lives of these five people in order to discover the impetus behind their deaths. He is, essentially, a product of the Enlightenment, a time in which human reason was exalted for its ability to reveal the secrets of the universe. His Enlightenment-era sensibilities tell him that he can use science to discover the complexities of religion and ultimately determine why these five people died prematurely. This is a grounding element of the novel — the belief that man can harness reason and logic to provide explanations for faith.
And so, one Enlightened man tries to provide an answer to one of the most pressing philosophical questions: is human life ruled by a higher power or governed by human action and chance?
Divine Salvation or Punishment?
As one might expect, the novel does not provide a clear answer. Ambiguity follows Brother Juniper’s wanderings. As he traverses the lives of the deceased, the reader is lead along simultaneously searching for answers. Is this why she was chosen to die? Did this action lead him here? The essential question is whether death at this moment makes sense in the context of lives of these characters.
The end of each chapter proclaims the death of a character — no conclusion, no explanation. Equipped with the crucial moments of their lives, supplied by Brother Juniper, the reader must decide what, if anything, led the characters to this tragic moment. Do the events of their lives explain the tragedy that befell them? Can we see the hand of God at work?
Take, for example, the character of Marquesa de Montemayor. One evening, in the midst of prayer, she whispers:
“Let me live now … let me begin again.”
She plummets to her death the next morning.
If all is ruled by God’s plan, this could be viewed as either divine salvation or punishment. Is she given a new life through her death? Or, rather, is she punished for the trespasses in her life that lead her to wish such a thing?
For practically every character one could see it both ways - death releases them from the tragedy of their lives, providing them, in the context of religion, with a new and better afterlife. Or, in a darker view, death acts as a punishment for their sins, as each character has severe moral failings.
If all is a plan, the plan is at the very least ambiguous — even with the best of human reason, can we ever decipher it?
The Tragedy of Choice
However, the narrative also provides a compelling argument that all is not preordained but rather the result of accident. It could be reasoned that random choices of the characters lead them to the bridge the moment it snaps; small changes in their lives could have easily averted the tragedy.
We see this, for example, with Esteban, who, when his twin brother unexpectedly dies, is thrown into turmoil over his choices — does he set sail with the captain of a ship for perilous adventures or carry on in the town shrouded with the memories of his brother?
His indecision ultimately leads him to the bridge one early morning in July. Was he meant to be there or was it merely an accident?
Looking back on his life and those of the other characters, one can see how they might end up on the bridge in the context of their lives. The real question is whether all of this was preordained or simply human fallibility.
Asking Questions, Withholding Answers
The best stories are often those that ask a question and then leave it there, floating across the pages, waiting for the reader to reach out and engage. The author provides the question, not necessarily the answer. Though many readers will find it frustrating that Wilder leaves us with no conclusion, it is this very lack of an answer that makes the story so enthralling.
The Bridge of San Luis Rey is a philosophical experiment that provides no answers, it simply presents us with the lives of the characters. Perhaps the real conclusion is that it is not necessary to know why these people died. Perhaps some things are simply not understandable, even when equipped with human reason.
Near the end of the book, we are told that, in a further attempt to answer his question, Brother Juniper studies the victims of a plague in a nearby village. He tries to study the lives of those who died, neatly creating a chart plotting the “Goodness,” “Piety,” and “Usefulness” of each person and allocating each a score. His results were distressing:
“He added up the total for victims and compared it with the total for survivors, to discover that the dead were five times more worth saving. It almost looked as though the pestilence had been directed against the really valuable people in the village of Puerto.”
And his reaction?
“He tore up his findings and cast them into the waves.”
Brother Juniper was unable to comprehend what he found; human reason did not assist him. He gave up. But rather than see this as a failure, his decision appears more of a choice — he chooses not to dwell over that which he cannot understand. In tearing up his findings he accepts that there are some things in the world that human logic will not be able to access. He continues to live, and he leaves the question suspended in the pages of the book.
“Some say that we shall never know and that to the gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on a summer day, and some say, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the finger of God.”
Meaning
While the story does not provide us an answer on whether we have fate or free will, it does leave us a lesson, one that we may have ignored. In our pursuit for knowledge, we missed the core of each character’s story: love. Whether our lives are conducted by a divine plan or the result of our own choices, it is what we leave behind that matters, the connections we make that will endure long after our deaths. Love continues to exist despite us ceasing to exist. We are connected to all that has come before us and to those that will come after us in our mutual, human experience of love, which is, Wilder tells us, the true meaning of the lives of the characters and of ours:
“But soon we shall die and all memory of those five will have left the earth, and we ourselves shall be loved for awhile and forgotten. But the love will have been enough; all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. Even memory is not necessary for love. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.”
This article was inspired by my reading of The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder.