41 pages • 1 hour read
Mary LawsonThe Other Side of the Bridge
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2006A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 5-8Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 5 Summary
Ian’s mother had been his father’s nurse as well as wife, which leaves a job opening that inevitably, after one nurse stays the summer and flees the winter, falls to Ian. It irritates Ian but eventually he accepts it. There is another nurse who helps his father during regular office hours, but emergencies and off-hour calls fall to Ian.
Ian turns 17 in this chapter and Laura Dunn makes him a cake, which instigates his first real conversation with her.
This chapter also introduces Ian’s girlfriend, Cathy. In Ian’s mind, their relationship is an accident of happenstance that he is willing to go along with. Ian also reveals his fear of sex, born not of nervousness or insecurity but from the fear of pregnancy, and that getting a girl pregnant would trap him in Struan.
For his birthday, his mother gives him a jacket he never wears, while his father gives him a beautiful wooden canoe. Ian loves the canoe, but thinks it a strange gift for someone who is leaving (as Ian plans to do) in a few months. Ian suspects his father may have unconsciously given it to him so he would have some reason to come back to Struan.
Ian and his father struggle to maintain a “normal” life in the absence of his mother. They draw closer in her absence, especially with Ian sharing in his father’s work. Ian believes his father is depressed and tries to help his father by talking about patients and helping him get his mind off of his now ex-wife.
Ian shows Pete the new canoe the day he gets it, and they fish together. Pete, for the first time, establishes a difference between himself in Ian when he, in jest, says “Well, well. A white man in a canoe” (101).He then hooks a fish so large it nearly pulls him out of the boat, breaking his line.
To help his father maintain some degree of normalcy, Ian goes with him to church, where he talks to the Dunn family outside of his work at the farm. For the first time the character of Carter, the oldest Dunn child, asserts himself in Ian’s mind. Later that night, the town sheriff knocks on Ian’s door with Carter; the Dunn boy is bleeding from the head. Carter had stolen his father’s truck and tried to drive it, winding up in a ditch.
Ian feels sorry for him and it is revealed that Arthur doesn’t seem to pay much attention to Carter and gives him chores that keep him near the house, near his mother.
The chapter closes with Ian once again playing peeping tom at the Dunn’s farm after dark.
Chapter 6 Summary
Jake is in the hospital for three months, which strains the Dunn finances. The world of Struan, at least for farmers like the Dunns, operate largely without cash, growing, making, and bartering for everything they need. Arthur’s father has to take out a loan to pay Jake’s medical expenses. It is the height of the Great Depression and debt is crippling many a farm. Arthur blames himself for his family’s debt, adding to his guilt, while his father blames Jake, adding to his unhappiness with his younger son.
Arthur returns to the bridge, trying to see if there was a way he could have saved Jake, but there isn’t. He has tried to tell his father about what happened, but only gets to the part about Jake hanging from the pipe when his father interrupts: “‘he was foolin’ around,’ Arthur’s father said, splitting the trunk of the poplar with one savage blow. ‘Just like I thought. Foolin’ around, like always’” (114). Arthur ends up putting even more blame on Jake in his father’s mind when what Arthur meant to do was take some of the blame.
Jake finally comes home at the end of summer, but he walks with a limp and is clearly in pain. He and Arthur finally talk, and Jake asks Arthur if Arthur meant what he said on the bridge. Arthur is taken aback by the “direct, simple, unbearable question” (116).He tells Jake, “Jesus, no, Jake. Oh, Jesus, no” (116). Jake then asks why his father didn’t visit him in the hospital, which Arthur says was because it was too expensive.
His mother still makes Arthur go to school, though all his friends have long since stopped. A short while later, Canada enters World War II, and Arthur and his friends try to enlist. Arthur is denied because of flat feet. His friends are accepted into the army, and head off to war, which leaves most of the farms in the area shorthanded. His father says that Arthur can stop school and will work the farm, and perhaps the neighbors’ farms as well.
His mother tries to argue, but his father sticks to his plan: “and that was the end of it. Freedom. Nineteen years old, flat-footed and riddled with guilt, but free at last”(126).
Chapter 7 Summary
Ian’s schoolyear is near to ending and he must tell his guidance counselor what he plans to do after high school, but he’s unable to come up with an answer. He tells him he wants to be a farmer, though he doesn’t. Mr. Hardy, the guidance counselor, calls his bluff and asks him if he wants to apply to an agricultural school near Toronto. Ian says he wants to think about it.
Ian is studying one day when his father calls for him to help in the office. When Ian gets downstairs, he sees “a sizable pool of blood on the floor” (130). Two men, one of them Pete’s neighbor, a native man named Jim Lightfoot, have been in a knife fight. The other man is badly wounded, the knife having cut into his leg and hit an artery. Ian clamps the artery to slow the bleeding while his father gets ready to give the man a blood transfusion, but before that happens, the man dies.
Ian is taken by surprise: “he couldn’t believe it. It couldn’t be over as quickly, as simply, as that” (135). Ian is shocked both by the death and by the realization that for his father, a doctor, “it wasn’t a shocking or unusual occurrence, it was a commonplace. Which was the most shocking thing of all” (139).
Jim Lightfoot is arrested for the murder, which he may or may not have committed. His arrest sparks considerable unrest and tension between the town of Struan and the native community living on the edge of it. Ian has a math test, one necessary to graduate, and his friend, Pete, almost does not make the test, which makes Ian upset. Ian and Pete fight, partly about what has happened to Jim Lightfoot, who is in jail. Pete points out Ian’s naivete, saying, “you have such a simple view of life” (144).
This time, Ian does not retreat to the Dunn farm to get away. Instead, he takes the canoe out on the lake to fish. He ends up thinking of his mother and we learn that she has written him every week for three years and Ian has thrown all the letters away without opening them.
When Ian comes back from his paddle, his former girlfriend, Cathy, is waiting for him. She wants to get back together with him and Ian once again goes along with her, though it’s obvious he does not feel the same way about her that she does about him.
Ian welcomes the chance to work on Arthur’s farm on Saturday, the simplicity and physicality of it a welcome retreat from the troubles of his life. Carter has a fight with his mother while Ian is there. Ian volunteers to help out around the house instead of working in the fields so that Carter can do what he needs to do. Arthur says okay and Ian gets to spend the afternoon at the house. He hoes the garden and plays with the kids until a car pulls up and Jake, who has been gone fifteen years, gets out.
Chapter 8 Summary
Arthur goes to the Luntz’s house to hear Mr. Luntz read letters from his boys, especially Arthur’s friend, Carl. Arthur’s friends in the army are still in England, training, and have seen no fighting. This routine keeps up for months, then years, as 1940 passes.
The farmers are having a harder time than the troops since nearly an entire generation of the town’s males has shipped out overseas for the war. Otto Luntz, unable to work all his fields with his three sons gone, asks Arthur and his father to take over some of them, in exchange for a little rent, if they can afford it. Arthur and his father agree to do it. Luntz looks at Arthur while asking, making Arthur feel “a small surge of pride that Mr. Luntz recognized that he was part of the picture now” (163).
In August 1942, the Luntz family receives two telegrams in one day, informing them that two of their sons are dead. The next day, they get another saying that Arthur’s friend, Carl, is missing, and then the day after that, a fourth telegram announces Carl is dead as well. Not long after that, Mr. and Mrs. Luntz move away, leaving Arthur and his father to work their land.
To help with the considerably larger amount of land, Otto Luntz gives Arthur and his father the tractor. After dinner that night, Arthur and his father start up the tractor. Arthur’s father drives off down the road going fast and Arthur takes off chasing him on foot, thinking that he doesn’t like the noise of the tractor: “You could still hear the roar. And then all at once the pitch changed” (174). Arthur’s father crashes the tractor into a ditch and it rolls on top of him, crushing and killing him.
The chapter closes with Jake finally admitting that he wanted his father’s approval: “I thought when I grew up and got a job somewhere, doing something important, he’d see I wasn’t useless. You want to know the truth? I hate him for dying before he learned I wasn’t useless. That’s the truth” (177).
Chapters 5-8 Analysis
These chapters mark both Arthur and Ian’s respective transitions to manhood with the events that will define them: Jake’s accident and his father’s death, in Arthur’s case, and Ian’s mother leaving.
Part of Ian’s journey in these chapters is beginning to let go of his obsession with Laura Dunn. He slowly begins to lose some of his idealization of her in the face of actual experience with her, making her more human and less of an archetype in his eyes. The introduction of Cathy as Ian’s girlfriend also works to give Ian a greater understanding of himself.
While Ian is growing up, he is also still clearly a boy, and both women function for him as surrogate mothers, with each filling in a bit of the role that his own mother left unfulfilled.
Arthur reaches the moment that will come to define his relationship with his brother when Jake falls from the bridge. This, combined with losing his friend Carl Luntz in the war, serves to hollow out Arthur and he is never made fully whole again.
In this sense, the death of his father is almost anticlimactic, in part because Ian’s timeline has already revealed it, but also because compared to the perceived betrayal of Jake, his father’s death is, for him, more of an unfortunate accident. The accident does, however, set up an escape for the troubled Arthur by giving him two farms to run and a way to disappear into his work.
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