They are the lucky ones not because they are alive, but because they understand the love that existed for them, and will always exist even though the beloved are gone. Those characters that survive and feel such sorrows for having been left behind are equally compelling again, I felt as if I myself experienced their moments of profound transformation, almost like a transubstantiation, into another element: the element of understanding. I experienced first-hand the changes the main characters undergo over the course of their individual stories, and I mourned their demise as they crossed the bridge in what was supposed to be a cross over to a new way of life but instead was the step that ended their lives in one whip crack of collapse. All the characters, main and peripheral, are so perfectly rendered that I felt as if I myself had seen them on the streets of Lima. There are no stereotypes, and even minor characters are richly portrayed in a multitude of dimensions. This Wilder is imaginative but completely genuine with his characters, each more exquisite and bizarre than the next, and each portrayed down to the smallest detail of countenance, spirit, and philosophy. This novel was nothing like the Wilder I know from having seen and read Our Town. There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” But the love will have been enough all those impulses of love return to the love that made them. “oon 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.

He should have left faith out of the equation completely: as the old Abbess of the orphanage/hospital understands, the love between humans is the only connection that matters:

For his efforts to see a link between the character of a person and the sudden, premature death brought on by calamity, he is burned at the stake for heresy. In The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder, a priest tries to find the connection between the five people killed by the unexpected collapse of the Bridge of San Luis Rey and his faith in God. The Bridge of San Luis Rey: Collapse and ConnectionĮvery great book has as a theme the need for connection: the human desire to connect with another living being.

The bridge of luis rey