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Prologue: At Rome
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Death Comes for the Archbishop, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Spirituality vs. the Material World
Friendship and Compromise
Humanity’s Relationship with Nature
Colonialism, Industry, and Loss
Memory, Death, and Afterlives
Summary
Analysis
Now it’s 1851, and a lone horseman is lost in the middle of the New Mexico desert. The horseman—Jean-Marie Latour—is amazed by how one-note the landscape is; the red hills are “so exactly like one another,” he reflects, that they form a “geometrical nightmare.” Even the juniper trees are all exactly alike. For someone “sensitive to the shape of things,” Latour feels the need to close his eyes, a break from the sight.
Over time, Latour will grow intensely sensitive to variations and clues in his desert landscape. But for the moment, Latour has not yet learned to appreciate his surroundings. It is also significant that readers first encounter Latour alone in the desert, a symbolic image that links the priest to Christ (who, in the bible, spent 40 days wandering in the desert).
Themes
Literary Devices
When Latour opens his eyes, he notices an unusual juniper tree—one shaped, in fact, exactly like a cross (“the cruciform tree”). Latour gets off his horse and kneels before the tree with his Bible. Even from a distance, it is clear that Latour is a special person; he shows a special kind of courtesy to his animals, to himself, to his landscape, and to God.
If Latour’s desert location already brought a biblical sensibility to the scene, the appearance of this cross-shaped tree further cements the link between Latour and Christ. The cross-shaped tree (which also recalls the burning bush from the Old Testament of the bible) also immediately links religion to nature—Latour is a special person not just because he worships God, or because he respects his landscape, but because he does both.
Themes
Latour remounts his horse. He has been without water for a day, and he knows that he and the horses cannot survive much longer. Though he tries to blot out his own discomfort by meditating on Jesus’s pain, Latour cannot fully distance himself from the situation; he blames himself for his horses’ predicament.
If spiritual and material interests are often in conflict, here, the novel makes clear the impossibility of ever truly shedding “worldly” cares. After all, Latour can link his own suffering to Jesus’s pain for as long as he wants, but he will not be able to continue meditating on this thought unless he gets the tangible, material things he needs (like food and water).
Themes
Though Jean-Marie Latour was made a bishop a year ago at Cincinnati, he still has yet to establish his vicariate. First, no one in Cincinnati had known how to reach far-off New Mexico, other than to advise Latour to go by boat from New Orleans to Texas. But Latour’s boat had been shipwrecked near Galveston, and then, crossing Texas, he had fallen out of a wagon and hurt himself. It had taken almost 12 months for him to reach Santa Fé, his new home; when he finally rode into his new home, he did so alongside Father Joseph Vaillant, his boyhood friend and colleague.
Jean-Marie Latour is based on a very real figure, the Archbishop Jean-Baptiste Lamy. That nearly all of these injuries were ones the real Lamy suffered speaks to the immense difficulty of navigating this treacherous area. Indeed, more than any spiritual concerns or personal tensions, Latour’s greatest challenge in managing his new vicariate will be in merely getting from one place to the next.
Themes
Literary Devices
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But once Latour had reached Santa Fé, the priests there refused to accept his authority, insisting they reported to the bishop of Durango. To prove his legitimacy, Latour had to go down to Durango himself, and receive his letters from the bishop there. But the journey from Santa Fé to Durango is long, and it is on this trip that Latour is now lost and close to dying of thirst.
The lack of communication between the Catholic outpost in Santa Fé and the central church in Rome again speaks to the ways that New Mexican Catholicism has taken its own shape. Interestingly, just as Christ’s time in the desert helped to legitimize him in the eyes of his contemporaries, Latour’s accidental fast comes from his own desire for legitimacy.
Themes
Suddenly, the horses quicken their pace, smelling water. Soon, Latour arrives at a river in the desert. The “ribbon” of land around it is “greener than anything Latour had ever seen, even in his own greenest corner of the Old World”; there are trees everywhere, and little adobe houses. A young girl approaches Latour, and when he informs her that he is a priest, she remarks that such a thing has never happened before. She thinks Latour must be the answer to her father’s prayers.
If the desert Latour has been wandering in has biblical symbolism, then it is not an accident that this “greenest corner” of the world sounds vaguely like the Garden of Eden. Crucially, Latour finds salvation only after he stops to pray at the cruciform tree, a sequence that suggests true miracles are at work.
Themes
