Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop

Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop

Upon reading and reflecting on Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop, I have a hard time classifying this piece of literature as a novel. Indeed, Death Comes for the Archbishop seems more like a collection of anecdotal stories than a novel of conventional form.

Harmon and Holman's A Handbook to Literature says the term novel, is "used in its broadest sense to designate any extended fictional narrative" (350). While DCA certainly fits this most general of definitions, its unconventional structure -- the seeming lack of a general plot and obvious climax, its continual digressions from Bishop Latour's present to the anecdotal episodes of his, as well as, others' pasts, along with the method of Cather's presentation, leads one inclined to label this piece more as a narrative, a simple "account of events," as The American Heritage Dictionary describes the term.

DCA doesn't seem to be driven by a plot so much as by the stream of consciousness of the narrator. Much the way the mind will jump from thought to thought or memory to memory, Cather's narrator tells the story of Bishop Latour's life through contrasting, non-chronological stories. For example, in Chapter 1, Book 4, the narrator has Latour waking to the sound of a bell which then leads Fathers Latour and Vaillant into a discussion of its history as well as, the history of silver work in general. Directly from this discussion, comes the request by Vaillant that Latour give audience to a man who had just been on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe, and from there, we are told the story of Juan Diego in the year 1531. This type of jumping around on the narrator's part, not only lends a sense of a more ...

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... of the people and land encountered within her writing.

"Cather has come to the point where she can do two or three things at once which a novelist must do. She can evoke by a few characteristic touches and by subtle suggestion a scene and a society without producing merely a 'document' "(Joseph Wood Cruch). "She has a faculty of seeing people with sympathy but without sentiment, of exactly telling their experiences, of emphasizing neither the good nor the bad, of changing nothing to meet popular taste" (Cowley).

In summary, Willa Cather is a remarkable writer. She uses not only past experiences, but her remarkable talents to write fiction that is not only narrative in telling, but also includes a great deal of description. Whether her writing is regarded as a novel by some, or as a narrative herself, it has elements of both in Death Comes for the Archbishop.