Bridge to Terabithia Family

Here the narrator moves into second person to describe Jess's place in his family. Since most of the book is in third person limited omniscient (see "Narrator Point of View" for more), this is unusual. It has the effect of putting readers into Jess's shoes and forcing us to really empathize with his position.

Jess's ambition to run fastest is fostered by a desire to please his family. In ascending order, he'll have the glory of being the fastest; the sister he likes best, May Belle, will "pop her buttons"; and "even his dad [will] be proud." That's the most exciting thing about the fantasy of winning – getting approval and acknowledgment from his dad.

Jess feels like an alien in his mostly female family. Everyone on the farm is female, even the livestock. The only other guy is his dad who's never there. So what this really tells us is that Jess's dad seems like an absent parent and Jess craves his father's approval and attention. Without his dad around, he feels even more isolated and alone.

Jess is jealous of his siblings because he feels like their dad is more loving and affectionate with them. They get the attention he craves. Yet he has to act like a "man," which seems to mean here that he doesn't get hugs and can't spontaneously demonstrate or ask for physical attention or reinforcement.

We can see here that Jess's feeling about what constitutes family and whom he's closest to in the "real world" doesn't jive with what an outsider might think when just looking in. Brenda, his actual relation, would seem closer to him than his dear friend Leslie, even though that's so far from the truth it's laughable.

Poor Jess and poor Jess's dad. Even though this present cost more than the Aarons could afford, it's still relatively cheap: it doesn't even work that well. Because it's flawed, Jess's dad is embarrassed and angry: it points to how much money they don't have and how, even when they do more than they can afford, it's still not enough. Somehow, Jess was able to get around this and give Leslie a present that transcend categories of money, but his father has not yet learned how to do so.

Well, we know all about Jess's absent father, and faded mother, and here we see Leslie's mother is absent in a different way. She's there, in the same house as they are, yet she's also not there. Her brain is somewhere else. She makes all the right motions and says the same thing Jess's mother might have, but it doesn't mean the same thing somehow. For one of the first times, we realize that Leslie might have a similar problem to the one that Jess has, just in a different form.

Jess's mother doesn't come off too well here in comparison to Leslie's – Leslie's is creative and preoccupied in the quest for establishing new knowledge, while Jess's is preoccupied by emptying her mind and letting other people's ideas fill it.

For most of the book, we see Jess's parents through his biased lens, and see them in a negative light – especially in comparison to Leslie's parents, or to Leslie and Jess's own actions. But here we're reminded of their deep love for Jess as we see their fear that he was in danger and their relief that he's OK.

This is, finally, the physical affection Jess wanted at the beginning of the book and felt like he couldn't have. But, just as he gets to be the fastest runner when it doesn't matter anymore, here Jess is so grief-stricken over the loss of Leslie that his father's affection doesn't have the positive impact it might have had under more normal circumstances. Affection is still tied to the idea of youth rather than growing up or maturity, as Jess's father cradles him "as though he were a baby."