41 pages • 1 hour read
The Other Side of the Bridge
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Chapters 3-4Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 3 Summary
Ian goes to Arthur’s farm for his first day of work and discovers that it’s very different than he imagined. What Ian wanted was to be near Laura Dunn, but he sees her for less than a minute; instead, he gets close to Arthur Dunn. He also discovers that farming is hard work, and that his body aches: “before the first hour was up his muscles–all of them, in every part of his body–reminded him of the diagrams of human musculature in his father’s textbooks: the muscles were drawn in red ink and looked raw and stretched to breaking point” (50).
Ian says he sustains himself through the work by dreaming of how he’ll eat lunch with Arthur and Laura and get to be close to her and have conversation with her, but again, the reality is different. Lunch is busy and noisy, there are three kids to feed, and he again has no time to interact with Laura Dunn the way he wants to.
After work, Ian goes home. He takes two bathes to get all the mud and dirt off of him and then goes down to dinner, where his parents tell him they’re getting a divorce. His mother is leaving Struan to marry one of Ian’s teachers, whom Ian describes as “tall and thin and had wire-rimmed glasses and a sarcastic manner. There was no way anyone could love him” (60).
Despite Ian’s rationalizations, his mother does indeed leave him and his father. She asks Ian to come with her, but when he asks if he won’t go, would she go anyway, she says yes. Betrayed, Ian elects to remain with his father in Struan: “He understood, finally, that he was not important to her. Not that important” (61).
To console himself, he walks out to Arthur’s farm in the dark and watches Laura Dunn breastfeed her baby.
The day his mother finally leaves, Ian at first does not even interrupt his school work to say goodbye. Finally, with his mother crying, and Ian claiming he doesn’t care, he says goodbye without even turning around to look at her. She then departs.
Chapter 4 Summary
Time has moved ahead considerably; it is now 1938, and Arthur is 17. The chapter opens with him lamenting that he has never had a girlfriend, as he is too shy to talk to women. Jake, on the other hand, was, according to Arthur, “born knowing” (65) how to talk to women and has no trouble with girls at all.
Jake is presented as someone who’s respected more than previously, in part because of his success with girls. He has “more friends who were female than male,” and that makes “other boys […] a bit suspicious, maybe even a little afraid of him” (65). It’s further revealed that the incident where Jake got Arthur in trouble at school was not an isolated one. Other children fear him because Jake had “the ability to get people into trouble–anyone who had been through primary school with him knew that” (65).
Arthur spends most of the chapter arguing with his mother about school. She wants him to stay in school, but Arthur feels trapped in school and doesn’t see the point. He’s 17 and still in tenth grade. He can “hardly squeeze his body into the space between the desk and the seat” (67) he’s so large. He feels he’s a grown man and school will teach him nothing useful he needs to know for his life running the farm.
He asks his father if he can quit school but his father differs to his mother, who tells Arthur he must remain in school. Arthur trudges through his existence at school, living mainly for his time on the farm and Saturday nights in town, when he and his friends go to the bar. They’re too young to go in the bar, but “the liquor generally found its way out” (69), and their favorite activity is fighting. Arthur does not get involved in the fights, but he is happy “just standing on the sidelines, watching” (70).
This chapter introduces Arthur’s friend Carl Luntz, one of three sons of Otto and Gertie Luntz, who own the farmland adjacent to Arthur’s father’s land. Carl and Arthur spend their weekend at the bar.
Jake continues to avoid farmwork. He gets home late in the evening and his father angrily asks where he’s been. Jake says he’s in a play, Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet. Jake is Romeo. Jake’s mother defends him and gets their father to let him out of work again, but Jake’s father and Arthur do not go to the play. Afterward, Jake is clearly very hurt, going to his room without speaking.
“He so badly wanted you to come,” (75) says Arthur’s mother, which is the first time in the novel that she reproaches her husband at all. Arthur’s father is angry and “stung by guilt and his wife’s reproach”; he says “farming’s important. Work’s important. Time he knew what matters and what doesn’t”(75).
The next scene is a ten-day blizzard that traps everyone inside and has Jake and his father at each other’s throats. Jake wants to play cards; his father does not approve. Arthur and his father have to put down a sick horse and Jake makes an ill-timed joke that further infuriates his father and drives them more apart.
One day, about a month after the storm, Arthur’s father asks Jake and Arthur to take two cows over to the Luntz’s farm. Jake tries to get out of the job, but this time his father insists. Jake and Arthur walk the cows over the Luntz farm, with Jake, as usual, screwing around as they go. They get to a bridge that crosses the river that separates the Dunn’s property from the Luntz’s. Jake wants to try going across hanging from a pole below the river, hand over hand.
Arthur ignores his brother’s behavior, even when Jake gets under the bridge to go across. Arthur is well inured of Jake’s antics at this point. Jake tries to make it a competition, but Arthur ignores him. Arthur sets about getting the cows across while Jake tries to cross below, hanging from the pipe, going hand over hand. Jake starts to say he can’t do it, but Arthur assumes he’s pulling his leg and continues to ignore him. Jake continues to yell and Arthur is not sure whether to believe him or not. Finally, Jake yells “I’m going to fall” (83) and Arthur, frustrated with years of Jake’s behavior, says “good” (83).
Jake falls onto the rocks and into the icy river. Arthur rescues him, carrying Jake back to the house, where Dr. Christopherson, Ian’s father, puts him in an ambulance and rushes him to the hospital. Left behind, Arthur is wracked with guilt about what happened, and most of all that he said, “Good” (83).
Chapters 3-4 Analysis
After he gets home from farm work, Ian has a bath and despite commenting on the strangeness of both his parents’ behavior, he is lost in his own thoughts. He is proud that he’s done his first day’s work, and even more proud that Arthur asked him to come back the following Saturday. This is not the first time the novel brings up the theme of the pride in hard work, but it’s the first time it comes up in Ian’s timeline and helps to link Ian and Arthur, who both value hard work and, more importantly, a bearing up under hardship–whatever the cause–with stoicism. This stands in contrast to Ian’s mother, who in the very next scene does the opposite.
The scene with his parents at dinner seems to happen at a distance for Ian. When his mother tells him she’s leaving to marry one of his teachers and move back to the city, Ian feels like he’s not that important to her, which is correct from his point-of-view but also serves to establish his youth and naivete, as he is completely unable to see the divorce from his mother’s perspective.
The word choice and narration in this section highlights Ian’s detachment from the pain he feels. He seems to have stepped outside himself, and is watching himself as the reader does for a few pages. At the end of the section he is completely outside himself and “impressed by his response–how calm it sounded” (61).
His refuge from this central crisis is spying on Laura Dunn. Ian doesn’t seem to have any ill intent, though he is aware that if he were caught, he would be called a “peeping tom” (109). Rather, he needs to connect, however imaginatively, with some other mother figure in his life, and Laura Dunn is the closest thing he has.
The fourth chapter starts with an innocent portrait of life on Dunn farm. The conflict between Arthur and his mother about school continues a running theme of school not being very useful for someone like Arthur, who plans to be a farmer like his father. This also serves to contrast with Jake, who not only excels at school but participates in after-school activities like the play, primarily, the reader suspects, as a way to avoid working on the farm.
Arthur is also shown as willing to confront what life gives him, while Jake avoids it. During the blizzard, when the horse takes sick, it’s Arthur who goes with his father to try to help the horse. Further, it’s Arthur who has to witness his father shooting it, “that great still body on the frozen floor”(78).
While Jake takes refuge from the farm in a play, Arthur takes refuge from school in Saturday nights. True to character, Arthur is always on the sidelines, watching his friends get drunk and fight but never doing so himself. Arthur has also reached a kind of peace with Jake at this point. He says he doesn’t hate him, or not very often, but he also doesn’t understand him. Jake has become almost like a background irritation to Arthur: present, but not something Arthur pays much attention.
This change in relationship sets up the accident on the bridge, the event from which the book takes its title and one of the defining moments in the story of Arthur and Jake. Thanks to the backstory that has established the characters, there is nothing about the scene that’s unexpected. Jake takes a risk, as he always does; the difference is that this time, Arthur doesn’t save him. Jake falls and even though Arthur does save him, Arthur feels guilty for saying “good” (83) when Jake said he was going to fall, and also worries that Jake will tell his parents that he said it.
The chapter closes with a flash forward through Arthur’s future nightmares, in which he is forever going over and over those final seconds on the bridge, “trying to change them: trying to replace what happened with what should have happened, what he should have done” (85).
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