Kendrick Mullen 3/6/23 St. Augustine Of Canterbury 7W Literary Analysis of Bridge to Terabithia ”Grief is forever. It doesn't go away; it becomes a part of you, step for step, breath by breath.”-Jandy Nelson. This is an exemplification of what happens in the story Bridge to Terabithia, by Katherine Patterson. The main character, Jess, meets a wonderful girl named Leslie. Throughout the book, she changed his opinion of imagination, and he fell in love with her. Soon following this, they experience a fallout. Throughout the novel, Patterson displays themes of significant tragedy, grief because of the people stressing the tragedy, and the quest for identity. Jess experiences a major tragedy …show more content…
There are 5 stages of grief. In this book, Jess experiences them all. First off, Jess experiences denial. This Is shown when he says, “No…She can swim real good”.(Patterson 131) He is creating a mental fantasy that helped him think that what happened did not happen. This was just not the case. Soon after he experiences the second stage of grief. Anger. Jess gets very mad at everyone, and at the funeral, he angrily scolds the woman that took him on the trip, saying that Leslie should have been there. This was because he was not in the right mind. Another example of Jess expressing this stage of grief was when he, again, not in the right mind, said, “I hate her”(Patterson 147), as in Leslie. He was so angry that she had passed that all of a sudden he thought that it was her fault that he felt this way and he “hated” her for …show more content…
Almost so much so that his personality is erased, and he starts a quest for identity. This is a life-changing experience for people, especially children. At the beginning of the book, Jess is very unimaginative. Following this, Leslie comes along and changes his perspective completely, and he starts to give in a bit as shown when he starts off saying repetitively yeah over and over again. Eventually, she will speak about having their own country and he will ask, “Where could we have it?”(Patterson 50) which proves that he is interested. Later in the book, you can tell that he got more into the imagination because he says, “Out you go! Out! Out!” (Patterson 91), signifying that he was imagining an enemy and was chasing them out of Terabithia. This was during the period between meeting Leslie and her death. Following this, he lost Leslie, which was almost like taking the battery out of the car, but the car is his imagination. He no longer had a sturdy imagination since the accident. This upset him, so he now had no choice but to “choose a side” meaning that he needed to either find a new core of imagination to build off of or just go back to the way things were