Willa Cathers Death Comes for the Archbishop Essay -- Willa Cather De

Willa Cathers Death Comes for the ArchbishopUpon reading and reflecting on Willa Cathers 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 formal form. Harmon and Holmans 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 roughly general of definitions, its unconventional structure -- the seeming lack of a general plot and obvious climax, its continual digressions from Bishop Latours present to the anecdotal episodes of his, as well as, others pasts, on with the method of Cathers presentation, leads one inclined to label this piece more as a narrative, a simple account of events, as The Ameri behind Heritage mental lexicon describes the term.DCA doesnt seem to be driven by a plot so much as by the stream of consciousness o f the narrator. Much the way the brain will jump from thought to thought or memory to memory, Cathers narrator tells the story of Bishop Latours life through contrasting, non-chronological stories. For example, in Chapter 1, Book 4, the narrator has Latour waking to the salutary 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 cause of jumping around on the narrators part, not unaccompanied lends a sense of a more ... ... of the people and land encountered within her written material.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 suggest ion a scene and a society without producing merely a document (Joseph Wood Cruch). She has a faculty of seeing people with sympathy solely 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.