![]() In so doing, he asks the novel’s pivotal question: “Why did this happen to those five?” The Bridge of San Luis Rey is comprised of five parts or chapters the first, entitled “Perhaps an Accident,” introduces readers to the tragedy and Brother Juniper’s role in its history. Deeply affected by the lives lost in the bridge’s collapse, Brother Juniper begins a mission to uncover the truth about the five victims. Wilder then introduces Brother Juniper, a Franciscan missionary who witnessed the tragedy. Immediately, the reader knows the tragic fate of the novel’s five main characters, but their significance is still a mystery. Winner of the 1927 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Thornton Wilder’s The Bridge of San Luis Rey begins: “On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.” Much like the opening of The Eighth Day (1967), Wilder begins at the height of havoc. Brother Juniper then embarks on a quest to prove that it was divine intervention rather than chance that led to the deaths of those who perished in the tragedy. ![]() ![]() ![]() “On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below.” With this celebrated sentence Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel read throughout the world.īy chance, a monk witnesses the tragedy. ![]()
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