Thornton Wilder's fiction work The Bridge of San Luis Rey is an exploration of meaning. When a friar witnesses a bridge collapse in front of him and five people die he concludes that it must be purposeful. He dedicates his next six years to learning who those people were and what brought them to the bridge in the hopes of determining the meaning of their deaths. After his research he can't point to any clear conclusion or unifying element of those people's lives. The book is received as heresy and immediately burned. In the end it is the old Abbess who knew two of the victims and became inadvertently involved with friends of friends of the others who makes sense of the tragedy. She proclaims that life and death or inevitable but uncertain, but each person can find meaning in life through love so that the moment of their death is not a loss after all.
The character of the Abbess is the unifying element which Brother Juniper misses in his research. She either personally knows the victims or comes to know the important people in their lives. As a religious authority, she is the one everyone unconsciously turns to for clarity in the midst of grief. And she grieves, having lost three of her most beloved students whom she considered her children. She does not, however, become embittered by their deaths. She continues to live according to her principle of love. Through her commitment to love people, she finds that her life is purposeful. By improving their lives and equipping them to do the same for others, she remains unconcerned about her death because she has accomplished something meaningful to people.
Brother Juniper fails in his mission because he is motivated by fear. After witnessing the bridge fall, he instantly recognizes that he could've just as easily have been on the bridge at that moment as not. He becomes afraid and depressed because he doesn't understand why life must be so fragile. Why would God allow this seemingly pointless accident to kill these people and thus rob them of their future lives? He determines to write the book in order to prove that there was a clear reason why each of them should've died in that moment, but he finds that there really isn't. His failure is personal because he fails to reconcile his soul to the concept of his own death and the randomness of it all. As a man of the cloth, he will never fully understand his profession and its purpose until he accepts the inevitably of his own death.
