Bridge to Terabithia Literary Elements

Fiction

There are no clear indicator pointing towards a fixed year when the action takes place but what is clear is that the action takes place in a rural area in the American south.

The narrator is a third person who describes the events from a limited omniscient point of view.

Tragic, ironic, comic, tragic

Leslie and Jess are the protagonists and the antagonist is the dull community they live in, a community that is unable to fully understand them and their passions.

The major conflict is the result of the discrepancy between what Leslie and Jess what and what the society thinks it is appropriate for them.

The novel reaches its climax when Jess finds about Leslie’s death.

The first time Jess sees Leslie, he is unable to tell if she is a girl or a boy. For him, it doesn’t matter what gender she is and the gender of them doesn’t represent a factor based on which they decide if they can or can’t be friends. The fact that Jess is unable to tell is Leslie is a girl or a boy foreshadows the fact that their relationship will not be affected by their gender or by how other see their relationship.

When Jess thinks that the day he spent with his favorite teacher visiting an art museum was the best day until then proves to be an understatement because later that day Jess finds about Leslie’s death.

When Jess and Leslie attend the Easter mass together, Jess explains to her his view on religion which displeases her. Jess has a negative view and but Leslie is not affected too much by it. Instead of accepting Jess’s ideas, she created her own by associating the teaching in the Bible with some works of fiction she is familiar with. But Leslie doesn’t make the same associations Jess does and she focuses more on the positive sides of the religion and on the love it promotes. Some fictional works are mentioned and the narrator makes an allusion associating the Bible with the book The lion, the witch and the wardrobe which is actually a Biblical allegory in which the main character is a representation of Jesus.

After Jess finds about Leslie’s death, he enters a state of shock that lasts for days and make him unresponsive to the outside world. In these critical times, we see a side of Jess’s father that the reader may be inclined to think it didn’t existed. Jess’s father is the one who manages to comfort his son and make him realize that while Leslie had died, it is not the end of the road. He assures Jess that everything will be fine and it is the perfect image of stability and comfort for Jess. Through this, the reader is shown that Jess’s father is actually a loving parent who is interested by the well-being of his children.

Janice is a student in the same school Jess and Leslie go to and one day, Leslie finds Janice crying in the bathroom. Janice tells Leslie that her father beats her and today she told her friends about it. Paradoxically, instead of receiving help from those around her, Janice is ridiculed for the fact that she is beaten by her father and instead of being helped, Janice feels rejected and alone.

The narrator draws a parallel between Jess and his peers in the beginning of the novel. The parallel is used to highlight Jess’s individual features while also creating the impression that the other children are one dimensional and all the same, following the same rules and social norms.

The city where Jess and Leslie live is used in a metonymical sense because it doesn’t refer to a particular town. Instead, it refers to the typical city, where everyone is expected to behave in a certain way, gender roles are clearly assign and everyone has to follow the unwritten rules of their society. These types of places kill individuality and discourage creative thinking and the narrator focuses on this aspect as well.

The peace would start at the top of his muddled brain and seep down through his tired and tensed-up body.