Death Comes for the Archbishop: Not a Novel :: Death Comes for the Archbishop

Death Comes for the Archbishop: Not a Novel If someone felt compelled to classify Death Comes for the Archbishop as a type of novel, the most likely candidate would be a regional novel. Clearly, the setting and local color of this work make the region a critical component. However, before classifying the work as a type of novel, it must be determined whether it is a novel or, as Miss Cather has asserted, a narrative. Based on the structure and content of the book, it does not meet the classical definitions of novel and plot, so would lend itself more accurately to Miss Cather's classification. The simplified definition of novel given in A Handbook to Literature is "an extended fictional PROSE narrative" (335). By this definition, Cather's book would qualify as a novel. But there is a great deal more to a novel than this definition implies. The handbook expands by stating: "some organizing principle-PLOT, THEME, or idea-should be present in a . . . a novel" (335). Cather's book has an idea - to illustrate the historical, regional and cultural context in which two European priests perform missionary work in the desert of the American Southwest in the last half of the nineteenth century. This idea does not constitute a plot. Aristotle maintained that a plot should create a whole with "the structural union of the parts being such that, if any one of them is displaced or removed, the whole will be disjointed and disturbed" (Holman/Harmon 377). The structure of Death Comes for the Archbishop is made up of a series of episodes consisting of the experiences of two missionary priests, and legends of the region, such as Our Lady of Guadalupe. Would the whole become "disjointed or disturbed" if some of the stories or legends were removed or rearranged? No. The work would lose some of its richness, but the whole would not become incomprehensible. I believe Willa Cather perceived this work as a narrative rather than a novel because it lacked what is traditionally considered a plot. The work's narrative form is reminiscent of a journal, and had it been written in the first person instead of third, it probably would have been classified as a journal narrative rather than a novel.