A Study Guide for Pierre Boulle's "The Bridge over River Kwai"

By Gale and Cengage

A Study Guide for Pierre Boulle's "The Bridge over River Kwai," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students. This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cengage Learning - Gale
• Release date: Jun 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9781535835534

Book preview

10

The Bridge Over the River Kwai

Pierre Boulle

1952

Introduction

French novelist Pierre Boulle's 1952 The Bridge over the River Kwai competes with his 1963 novel Planet of the Apes for the honor of being his most widely read work. Both are known to a broad audience through their film adaptations. The Bridge over the River Kwai takes place within a Japanese prison camp during World War II and superficially resembles a whole genre of works, often semi-autobiographical, with the same setting, from James Clavell's King Rat to the 1983 film Merry Christmas Mr. Lawrence, based on the memoirs of Laurens van der Post. However, Boulle later wrote his own memoir, My Own River Kwai, about the wartime experiences that lay behind his novel, which suggests a deceptively complex relationship between history and literature. Reading the two works together makes it clear that Bridge over the River Kwai bears an allegorical relationship to Boulle's own wartime experiences, something that is not intuitively clear from the novel alone. The true theme of Boulle's novel seems closer to other literature inspired by the war such as George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, which is concerned not with the recording of experiences, but with analyzing how the ideological conflicts of the war attacked not merely the bodies of soldiers and civilians who suffered in concentration camps, but the very foundation of human identity.

Author Biography

Pierre-François-Marie-Louis Boulle was born on February 20, 1912, in the city of Avignon in Provençe in southern France. His father was a successful lawyer and the greatest influence on the young Boulle. He spent much of his time duck hunting and capturing birds with his young son, introducing him to what Boulle considered a bucolic paradise. Boulle later said that those were the happiest years of his life and the source of all his later inspiration as a writer. But Boulle's idyllic youth was cut short in his fifteenth year when his father died. After receiving an engineering degree from the École Supérieure d'Électricité, Boulle worked as an engineer in France and then in 1936, like many Europeans of that era, sought his fortune in the colonies. He became an engineer on a rubber plantation in the British colony of Malaya, just north of Singapore. After the outbreak of World War II, Boulle was drafted into the French army as part of the universal conscription that was then the norm in European states. He was assigned to various military units in the French Colony