From: Rich Puchalsky Subject: The Bridge: spoil-o-thon Date: Wednesday, April 25, 2001 3:07 PM I recently decided to re-read _The Bridge_, since it was a while since I've last read it and since I need something to read in between work to avoid burnout. I thought that this time, I'd make notes as I went about things that I saw and post them here. These will be rather disconnected and rambling. If you're one of those UK people who pays for bandwidth by the word or something, you may want to kill this thread now. Needless to say, spoilers will abound. I thought I'd do a chapter a day, or so. I'm using HarperPrism edition ISBN 0-06-105358-9. I'll label my remarks by the chapter headings in the book. Coma Starts with the main character, unnamed, in a first person inner monologue from his crashed car on a bridge. The first paragraph starts a red-blood-on-the-bridge recurring image that I seem to remember crops up later a lot. The main character can't remember his name, remembers that he's an atheist and swore he'd never pray for help, dimly senses people rescuing him. I probably could go over each sentence of this and find some allusion to something or other, for instance, in the scene where he's wondering if he's being rescued, he thinks: "I lie on a flat plain, surrounded by tall mountains (or maybe on a bed, surrounded by ... machines? People? Either; both (Like, man, in the really wide view, they're the same. Far out.)" which is a reference to a Culture idea. I seem to remember that when this book was written Banks had written some Culture works but not published any. At any rate, we come to the signature concept of the book, introduced within the introduction as per Banks standard operating procedure: "Maybe there's life after life... hmmm. Maybe all the rest was a dream (yeah, sure), and I wake up to ("Thedarkstation") -- what was that?" The rest of the book is going to have the fantasy in this sentence explored: the main character is going to have a highly detailed hallucination of a bridge that he wakes up on, while in actuality he's in a coma in the hospital, recovering from his accident. In a section just above, the main character is wondering where he came from, there's a library list of a) God, b) Nature, c) Darwin, d) Marx, e) all of the above. Well, in the rest of the book the main character is going to try his own self-creation, of his environment, his body, everything. It's all in his head, of course, but this is still his one shot at being the Demiurge.