An Instructor's Guide to The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder

Note to Teachers

Themes: destiny, divinity, salvation

Set in colonial Peru in the early 18th century, The Bridge of San Luis Rey opens in the aftermath of an inexplicabletragedy—a tiny foot-bridge breaks, and five people hurtle to their deaths. For Brother Juniper, the Franciscan monkwho witnesses the accident, the question is inescapable. Why these five? Suddenly, Brother Juniper is committed todiscover what manner of lives they led, and to determine whether it was divine intervention or a capricious fate thatclaimed them. He begins his investigation into the lives of the five victims, up to the moment they crossed the bridge,and through his diligence we meet: the Marquesa de Montemayor, an elderly aristocrat who lives only for herdaughter, and the Marquesa’s servant girl, Pepita; Esteban, an identical twin consumed with love for his brother; andUncle Pio, a wise and wily old man who is taking Don Jaime, a sickly boy, to Lima to be educated as a gentleman.The last chapter returns to Brother Juniper, who finally completes his vast tome about the five lives that were endedwith the bridge collapse. For his efforts, he is condemned as a heretic and burned, along with his book, on Lima’scentral square.

Since its publication in 1927, The Bridge of San Luis Rey continues to be widely read and discussed as a masterpieceof American literature. Its precise, restrained narration earned Wilder the first of his three Pulitzer Prizes and it remains“one of the greatest reading novels in this century’s American writing ”(Edmund Fuller).

Thornton Wilder (1897-1975) wrote the classic plays Our Town, The Skin of Our Teeth, and The Matchmaker. Hisnovels include The Eighth Day and Theophilus North.

Questions for Classroom Discussion

1. Wilder writes that Esteban “discovers that secret from which one never quite recovers, that even in the mostperfect love one person loves less profoundly than the other.” Do you agree that there can never be two peoplethat love one another equally? How do two people survive in an unequal relationship?

2. Several critics have pointed out that the characters in Wilder’s plays are types—the mother, the young girl, theembodiment of evil—rather than realistic human figures. What about the characters in The Bridge of San LuisRey—the Marquesa, the Perichole, Manuel and Esteban, Uncle Pio: are they types too?

3. For his efforts to seek meaning in the accident, Brother Juniper is burned as a heretic. Discuss the role ofreligion in the book and Wilder’s attitude toward religion. Consider not only Brother Juniper’s fate but also thethoughts and deeds of the Abbess Madre Maria del Pilar and the apparent religious conversion of CamilaPerichole.

4. In a sense, The Bridge of San Luis Rey can be read as a novel about meaning: how we assign and perceivemeaning, how accidents and coincidences take on meaning in our daily lives. What conclusion does Wilder leadus to draw about the human endeavor to find meaning in the world?

5. Wilder once declared, “I am not an innovator but a rediscoverer of forgotten goods.” Discuss The Bridge of SanLuis Rey in the light of this remark. What particular “forgotten goods” has he rediscovered?

6. The Abbess Madre Maria del Pilar concludes that, in the end, it is love that gives meaning to life, that between“the land of the living and the land of the dead, the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.” In whatways did love give meaning to the lives of the five victims? In what ways did love fail them?