Sudden DeathWhat Bridge to Terabithia still teaches us.

Remarks from the Fray:

What does self-reliance involve, specifically? The ability to spend a day alone in the woods without panicking? Wrestling a lion? Being able to pluck and cook a chicken on an open fire? Being able to change a lightbulb or paint the wall of your house? I know lots of very succesful, self-reliant, independent adults who have never done any of those things, and probably wouldn't be able to.

Isn't self-reliance for the middle classes really the ability to be hired at some desk job and sit there doing a cognitive-intellectual job for at least thirty years? How does releasing our children into the woods help with that? It doesn't. We do it anyway because it's FUN. If you want your kid to be self-reliant, keep him inside on the computer as much as possible.

--Caromer

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Emily Bazelon (whose work I love) wrote: "The book's death focus goes too far for some people. Terabithia is ninth on the American Library Association's list of most frequently challenged books."

I don't believe that's the chief reason this book is 9th on the "most challenged" list. In my experience, the vast majority of book-burning drives are led by religious bigots. They hate BtT because it's also the story of an atheist and a (not yet fully realized, but latent) religious conservative transcending that constructed divide which, in their innocence, they don't know "exists."

Leslie's parents are atheists, and Leslie does not believe in God. Jess is brought up in what is implied or stated to be a religious conservative family. Katherine Paterson is subtle in teasing out this thread of the theme, but it is powerful comment, artfully made.

--Homba

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The book is different from the movie in many ways. Most of the fantasy imagining takes place to the side and none of the magical creatures featured in the move are ever even described. The book mostly stresses the impoverished life – financially and emotionally – of Jess Aarons and how Leslie Burke changes it utterly and forever.

Although Leslie is a crucial character, this is really Jess's story and Pearson has said that he is the character with which she most identifies. Leslie's death may have been "senseless and random," as Ms. Bazelon characterizes it, but the manner in which Jess is informed about it by his family is senseless bordering on cruelty. His sensitivity is not so much hostile to them as it is incomprehensible, with the exception of May Belle, the younger sister who adores him and shares many of his qualities and problems.

Jess is the character in the book into whose mind the reader is placed. Leslie remains more of an enigma. We come to adore her because she has so many admirable qualities and because Jess so clearly adores her.

At the end, as Jess grieves over her, we are told, "He thought about it all day, how before Leslie came, he had been a nothing – a stupid, weird little kid who drew funny pictures and chased around a cow field trying to act big – trying to hide a whole mob of foolish little fears running riot inside his gut."

The next line is central – "It was Leslie who had taken him from the cow pasture into Terabithia and turned him into a king." The bridge to Terabithia was never a rope swing. That was simply symbolic of the risk involved in crossing. The Bridge to Terabithia – at least for Jess – was Leslie (and, to a lesser extent, some of the adult characters in the book who really care about him).

As Bazelon's friend suggests, "death is always at the back of risk and beauty." Leslie's gift of watercolors and art pad to Jess at Christmas are secondary to her greater gift. By serving as the bridge to opening his own imagination, she forces him to take the risks necessary to transform himself from "a boy who draws" into an artist. This requires him to defy the strictures he and others have placed upon himself as qualifications to be a member of his family, his rural community, his congregation, a fifth grader, and a burgeoning man.

Certainly the book takes us through the stages of grieving with Jess with aplomb. However, it is how Jess ultimately chooses to create meaning out of Leslie's death that Pearson surely tries to convey what must come next for each of us.

Jess reflects, "Now it was time for him to move out. She wasn't there, so he must go for both of them. It was up to him to pay back to the world in beauty and caring what Leslie had loaned him in vision and strength."

The thing that the Bridge to Terabithia teaches us about death is that journeys without endings have no more meaning than those without beginnings or direction. In the end, all of our bridges do burn behind us (or snap or wash away). It is only in the ability to keep moving that we survive and avoid being trapped in kingdoms, no matter how alluring they may seem.

However, Jess does more than simply keep moving. He stops along the way to honor Leslie's memory – first in a quiet funeral service among their sacred pine grove and then, more meaningfully, by emulating her. She had made him a king. "He had thought that was it. Wasn't king the best you could be?"

But a king safe in his kingdom is a little bit selfish. So Jess reaches out instead and becomes the one thing in life greater than a king. He becomes a bridge builder. The bridge he chooses to construct to Terabithia is different than that chosen by Leslie. It is more conventional, safer. But that is merely a reflection in the differences of their personalities. In choosing to share, he most becomes like Leslie.

Just as the girl he adored was his bridge, so he becomes the bridge for the girl who adores him – his little sister May Belle. For most of the novel, Jess is too tied up in his own loneliness and depravations to see that she suffers from the same things. In the end, he gives her the thing most precious to him to help her begin to overcome her own fears as he has learned to do.

While Leslie's death was tragic, it is the final lines of the novel that brought a tear to my eye. They acknowledge that we are defined as individuals as much by what we lose as what we gain. That in the journey of life, the quality of the journey is marked not only by our courage in crossing the bridges built for us by others but through our generosity of spirit in taking the time to build bridges of our own.

And when he finished, he put flowers in her hair and led her across the bridge – the great bridge into Terabithia – which might look to someone with no magic in him like a few planks across a nearly dry gully.

"Shhh," he said. "Look."

"Where?"

"Can't you see 'em?" he whispered. "All the Terabithians standing on tiptoe to see you.

"Me?"

"Shhh, yes. There's a rumor going around that the beautiful girl arriving today might be the queen they've been waiting for."

--The_Bell

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