Similarities Between San Luis Rey And The Bridge Of Anthony

Death is inevitable and when you do die life will continue on without you. Some people may question whether or not the universe will care about their life and death after they die. In Thornton Wilder’s, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, and Leo Tolstoy’s, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, both authors seem to believe that the universe does care about peoples lives and their deaths. In The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy evaluates the subject of death and dying by describing the story of a worldly careerist and a high court judge who is brought face-to-face with his own death. In The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Wilder analyzes the lives of five individuals who all hurtled to their deaths when a bridge collapsed. He tries to answer the inescapable question: Why those

The author takes his time to analyze the lives of five individuals who hurtled to their deaths in an inexplicable tragedy. One important theme of the book is the question of whether our lives are destined by fate or assembled by random factors. It is portrayed in this, “Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan” (Wilder 6). Thornton Wilder believed that the five people who were killed in the bridge collapse were meant to die there and he was trying to prove that. Another noticeable theme represented through the book is the theme of love. Some of the characters like The Marquesa and Esteban learn about love throughout the book. They learn that love requires courage and they also learn that love can survive death. “There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning” (Wilder 148). This quote shows the theme of love and how, although these five individuals were killed in a tragedy, the love represented in their lives did not die with them. These two themes expressed in the book can be connected to the authors opinion on the universe