Willa Cathers Death Comes for the Archbishop: A Narrative Essay

Willa Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop: A Narrative When one thinks of a novel, a word that usually will come to mind is fiction. In fact, other meanings for the word novel are new and unique. Although an author may use real places, real time, or base their story on real events in part, their outcome is essentially a creation. We, as readers, are in a sense captive to the writer's imagination and must conform to the rules of the worlds they create. If we accept this, then Willa Cather's piece Death Comes for the Archbishop must be seen as a narration, rather than a novel. She is not fabricating, but rather recounting the story of Father Latour (based on Father Lamy) and his experiences in New Mexico. Her descriptions of the landscapes and people are so recognizably accurate; we can see her more as a reporter than a fiction writer in this book. For example she writes about the desert west of Albuquerque as a "country of dry ashes; no juniper, no rabbit brush, nothing but thickets of withered, dead-looking cactus, and patches of wild pumpkins" which "looks less like a p...