The ‘Troll Bridge’ is a wonderfully short and thought-provoking story by Neil Gaiman. With a plot fragmented into various periods of time, we are drawn in and out by the descriptive narrative. The narrative unifies the otherwise quite disparate nature of the plot, in which we follow young Jack as he grows, and returns again and again to the Troll Bridge he discovered as a child. Despite the length of the story, its various hinted at undertones – of melancholy, unfulfillment, resignation, dissatisfaction, time, relationships and so on – leave a lot of material for philosophical analysis.
Zhuangzi was an important figure for Daoism, and he collected his thoughts along with those of others in the Zhuangzi; produced in the Classical period in China. In this blog entry, I will be using his writing on perspectives to elucidate the message contained in the ‘Troll Bridge’.
For Zhuangzi, perspectives are fluid and we cannot be certain that our own current view is the correct one. We see the world ‘up close’ but we only need to move away to some ‘distance’ to see their variability. For example, a tree may seem giant, but once we move to a distant mountaintop, the tree becomes tiny and one among many. In the ‘Troll Bridge’, the protagonist Jack is confronted with the question of how much he has experienced in life, on three different occasions. Each time, he persuades the Troll to avoid eating his life, claiming that he has not yet experienced enough, and will be tastier once he has done more. In Zhuangzi, for
“[…] the very small to try to take in the scope of the very
large, is an invitation to confusion and disorder […] “
– Zhuangzi, Zhuangzi Yinde
Indeed, Ming Clarity is encouraged over dogmatic absolutism. In other words, Zhuangzi discourages fixed mindsets (such as, ‘x will provide value, but y will not’) and instead prompts us to nurture a more open-minded outlook (‘… maybe y will be valuable in a different way’). When Jack is seven, and he first meets the troll, he protests: “Not yet. I – I’m only seven. I haven’t lived at all yet. There are books I haven’t read yet. I’ve never been on an airplane. I can’t whistle yet – not really”. For seven-year-old Jack, these are the things he places value in, and he believes that once he has achieved these, his life with be more substantial and provide a better meal for the troll. Or so he tries to convince the troll.
However, when he stumbles upon the troll bridge for the second time, when he is fifteen, he has a new list of experiences he believes he is currently lacking. He says he hasn’t had sex, or been to America, or “[…] done anything. Not yet”. He seems to have forgotten his previous goals of whistling, flying and reading more books. Now, he is bound up in pubescent feelings for girls, and with this, his perspective has changed. When he comes back the final time, he has been married and had a child, moved around the country, been left by his wife and child, and realised he was never in love with his partner, to begin with. So, he is ready to surrender his life, because he feels there are no more worthwhile experiences to be gained. His perspective has changed again, and he is hopeless and disillusioned.
We can see his changing perspectives through the distinction in narrative voice between the three encounters with the troll bridge. Whereas, upon first discovering the old railway path, we are charmed with magical scenery and descriptions (“[…] I found myself on a shady path that was new to me and overgrown with trees; the light that penetrated the leaves was stained green and gold, and I thought I was in fairyland”), when he is older this is replaced with a focus on the rubbish and contamination of the path (“I stood beneath the bridge in the red brick arch, stood among the ice-cream wrappers, and the crisp packets, and watched my breath steam in the cold afternoon air”). And when he is fifteen, we hardly get any descriptive nouns at all, as this Jack is consumed entirely by Louise – the girl he is with and adores: “And all the time I wanted to kiss her and feel her breasts, and hold her, and be held by her”. Instead of adjectives, we are assaulted with excessive pronouns: “She told me about the battles she was having with her younger sister”, “We grinned at each other”, “We pressed close”, “We talked quiet nonsense”, “I pressed up against her“.
Zhuangzi wanted us to be able to free ourselves from our contained perspectives, acknowledging that to see from another’s perspective can illuminate our own errors, and broaden our knowledge. Without this occasional perspective on ourselves – without self-reflection aided by the stepping back, away from, our own perspective – we are in danger of closed-mindedness. Contemplating the circle of life, Zhuangzi contains the fable of the magpie; noting how animals are often unaware of the danger other nearby predators pose to them. For example, Zhuangzi is about to use his crossbow on a magpie, whilst at the same time, there is an unsuspecting cicada about to be killed by a preying mantis. Before this can happen, the magpie devours both of them. This, he says, shows the connectedness which unifies the different species: “We two different species are mutually seeing things in our own ways”. They are each individually unaware of the imminent danger to befall them.
Through Jack’s changing perspectives, Gaiman reveals how we often fail to realise our own interconnectedness. Jack at seven, fifteen, and then later in life, appear as three separate individuals. Perhaps this lack of a stepping back, of acknowledging other perspectives, is what leads Jack to have what comes across as a quite dissatisfying life. There is definitely the feeling that he is lacking something. This is why he ultimately resigns himself to being eaten by the troll. At the same time, this is when we, as the reader, are also forced to change our own perspective. When Jack’s life is consumed, he takes the place of the troll. Instead, the troll occupies his previous body: “I looked at him: wearing my life comfortably, easily, as if he’d been wearing it for years”. I think an important thing to note at the ending of the story, is that as the troll walks away in Jack’s body, he whistles. This was one of the earlier values Jack had placed on his life, but he had forgotten this as he grew up and his perspective changed.
And so, now Jack is forced to live out the rest of his life solely from the perspective of the other: trapped as a troll, until he finds his own life to devour. Having not paid enough consideration to his various perspectives, he is condemned to a life as a troll and must now see things permanently from another’s perspective.
Primary Sources:
Hansen, Chad, “Zhuangzi”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2017 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.) accessed via https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/zhuangzi/#PonP on 25/09/17
Bookish Ponderings 