Genre
Historical fiction
Setting and Context
Lima, Peru in 1714 following the collapse of the title bridge which has sent five travelers to their deaths.
Narrator and Point of View
Although describing things from a third-person point of view the perspective is technically by a first-person narrator who very occasionally refers to himself as “I.” In addition, the point of view of further complicated by the fact that individual chapters narrow the perspective to that of the victim of the tragedy whom that particular chapter is named after.
Tone and Mood
Spiritually contemplative as Brother Juniper seeks an answer to the question of why it would be god’s will to for this tragedy to occur at this particular moment to these particular victims.
Protagonist and Antagonist
Protagonists: the victims of the collapse of the bridge. Antagonist: the unknowable explanation for why bad things randomly happen people through no fault of their own.
Major Conflict
The conflict driving the narrative is Brother Juniper’s exhaustive efforts to understand the randomness of tragedy and his inability to find any satisfactory answers.
Climax
Brother Juniper and the book containing his investigation are declared heretical and both are burned into non-existence in the public square.
Foreshadowing
Just three paragraphs into the story, the cumulative effects of pure random chance involved in the events leading the victims to the tragedy of the collapsing bridge is foreshadowed in the story of Brother Juniper: “By a series of coincidences so extraordinary that one almost suspects the presence of some Intention, this little red-haired Franciscan from Northern Italy happened to be in Peru converting the Indians and happened to witness the accident.”
Understatement
N/A
Allusions
“Often on the long trips [Brother Juniper] had to make…he would fall to dreaming of experiments that would justify the ways of God to man” is an allusion to a significant line found early in Milton’s Paradise Lost: “I may assert eternal providence, / And justify the ways of God to men.”
Imagery
The imagery that describes the moment of the bridge collapse: “Then his glance fell upon the bridge, and at that moment a twanging noise filled the air, as when the string of some musical instrument snaps in a disused room, and he saw the bridge divide and fling five gesticulating ants into the valley below.”
Paradox
N/A
Parallelism
N/A
Metonymy and Synecdoche
“He was willing to lay down his life for the purity of the church” is just one of several examples utilizing the common metonym of “church” as a stand-in representing the whole vast machinery of Catholicism.
Personification
“Throughout the hours of the night, though there had been few to hear it, the whole sky had been loud with the singing of these constellations.”
