Manuel and Esteban, two protagonists in The Bridge of San Luis Rey, are orphaned twins who have developed an extremely close bond by sharing years of hardship and privation. In describing the intensity of their bond, the book uses a simile:
"[...] there existed a need of one another so terrible that it produced miracles as naturally as the charged air of a sultry day produces lightning."
Although the brothers rarely spoke to each other and often even avoided each other in the streets, this passage compares the ferocity of the brothers' attachment each other to the "charged," or intense, weather that creates lightning. The use of the connecting word "as" means that this comparison constitutes a simile. The narrator then goes on to list some of the "miracles" that result from the brothers' love, saying that "telepathy was a common occurrence in their lives" and that each brother is able to sense the whereabouts of the other.
Wilder's choice of language in this passage immediately illuminates the forceful nature of the brothers' relationships. By comparing their bond to lightning, a striking natural element, he also encourages the reader to view Manuel and Esteban with sympathy and respect.
This simile also develops the novel's concern with the blurry line between love and obsession and the existence of free will. At this point in the book, when Manuel and Esteban are completely defined by their fraternal bond and neither has formed any romantic attachments, their love is at its purest and most powerful. However, once Manuel encounters the Perichole and becomes unhealthily obsessed with her, their bond becomes corrupted by jealousy and degrades. At this point, the novel stops comparing the relationships to powerful natural phenomena as he does here, suggesting that love carries the awesome power of nature only when unmarred by individual egos or ulterior motives.
The narrator's casual assertion that the brothers' love "produced miracles" is also important. In his misguided efforts to prove the existence of God through quasi-scientific inquiry, Brother Juniper tries to demystify the unexplainable aspects of life, from the random bridge collapse to the complex bonds between different characters. However, as the decidedly non-scientific "miracles" the narrator describes here attest, the relationships at the heart of the novel defy Brother Juniper's bogus rationality. Ultimately, moments like these suggest that the scientific proofs for which Brother searches will never be able to explain emotional and psychological forces like the love between Manuel and Esteban.
Actress Camilla Perichole loses her young son Jaime in the bridge collapse. In the aftermath of the tragedy, Wilder uses simile and metaphor to express the Perichole's feelings about the funeral service held for victims, which she does not attend:
She thought of the vast ritual of the church, like a chasm into which the beloved falls, and of the storm of the dies irae where the individual is lost among the millions of the dead, features grow dim and traits fade.
Here, the Perichole uses a simile the elaborate rituals of the Catholic church to "a chasm" swallowing up her son. This sentence also uses metaphor to compare the Dies Irae (a Latin poem often included in Catholic funeral services) to a "storm" that will ultimately erase Jaime's memory.
The figurative language in this passage suggests that adherence to Catholic dogma can't provide consolation in the face of death. The "vast ritual of the church," which includes funeral masses that would have been familiar to everyone in this highly religious society, are meant to help people make sense of tragedies like the bridge collapse by slotting them within a theological framework. For the Perichole, however, these impersonal rituals compound her loss by erasing her son's memory. Imagining him disappearing into a "chasm" and disappearing among "the millions of the dead," she's envisioning a future in which even the people who loved Jaime most won't be able to remember him.
Ultimely, the Perichole visits the Abbess for spiritual guidance and learns that love, not dogma, is the best salve for grief. By the end of the novel, the Perichole has devoted her life to assisting the Abbess, finding tranquility through altruism. In her final speech, the Abbess notes that while only the Perichole preserves the memory of her son, the love she holds for them will survive both their deaths and become a "bridge" between the living and the dead. Arguing that the collapse victims and their loved ones are connected forever by love, the Abbess articulates a philosophy of grief predicated on care and sympathy for one's fellow people rather than rote obedience to institutions like the Catholic Church.
