The Bridge on the Drina
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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
. . .
n reaching for a thread of light in the vast darkness and despair as he wrote. The reader may empathize with him, and may honor his effort to maintain hope in a dark world, but his slow and dull style (trusting the translation is at least somewhat true to the original) certainly makes it difficult to feel as deeply what he obviously feels for his vision. For example, he sets forth the following as the words of a character late in the book:
The foundations of the world and the bases of life and human relationships in it have been fixed for centuries. This does not mean that they do not change, but measured by the length of human existence they appear eternal. The relation between their endurance and the length of human existence is the same as the relation between the uneasy, moving and swift surface of a river and its stable and solid bed whose changes are slow and imperceptible (246).
This passage goes on and on, all of it enclosed in quotation marks which usually indicate that the character at hand is truly either speaking or thinking the words on the page. At its conclusion, however, Andric informs the reader that "Bahtijarevic did not utter a single one of these words. Those who . . . carry their philosophy in their bloo
. . .
Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1689
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)
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