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The Bridge on the Drina

Ivo Andric's novel The Bridge on the Drina is unusual in its plot development, in its focus (or lack of focus) on characters, and in its basic meaning. Although the book covers four centuries--from the mid-sixteenth to the early twentieth--the plot does not have the sweeping feeling of an epic because the author focuses on the town of Visegrad in Bosnia and the bridge rather than on the people or even the events which take place. The work is less a novel, in fact, than an extended fictionalized declaration of the author's philosophy, which can be essentially boiled down to the view that despite many surface changes in history and in human relationships, nothing really changes at its core. The individual human being may meet death, and may be suffering at any moment, but elsewhere another human life is just beginning and joy is in another's heart. Another essential element of Andric's philosophy is that it is God who determines what endures in the world, and not human beings or their desires or actions. All of this may be true, and it may have been a form of consolation for the author and others lost in the terror and despair of World War II, but it does not necessarily serve the urgency or drive of the novelistic enterprise. The reader may find it difficult to remain involved or intrigued with a book whose cast of characters comes and goes, and whose underlying theme is that those individual characters or their lives do not matter as much as the tenet that as much as things change, or seem to change, the more they remain the same. The author's at times ponderous and plodding style as he expresses his philosophy does not help matters.

The fact that the author wrote the book in Belgrade in the middle of the Second World War, while Europe was being torn apart all around him, had to have played a part in shaping the philosophy of life he expresses in his novel. Also telling is the fact that the novel ends with the First World War, whi...

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The Bridge on the Drina. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 13:31, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1708174.html