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Book 5: The Miser
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
Bishop Latour has only one “worldly ambition”: to build a cathedral in Santa Fé that matches the town’s natural beauty. The longer he thinks about this dream, the more he feels that “such a building might be a continuation of himself and his purpose, a physical body full of his aspirations after he had passed from the scene.” In order to build this church, however, he will need benefactors like Don Antonio Olivares, a wealthy Mexican ranchero.
It is not an accident that Latour’s desire to build a church follows, plot-wise, immediately after Lucero and Martínez’s deaths; now, the novel is less about the day-to-day and more about a historical arc. Moreover, Latour’s church complicates several of the story’s key divides: between life and afterlife, between the spiritual world and the material one. First, Latour wants to continue—in “physical” form—beyond his own life, extending his memory long after he dies. And second, Latour’s “worldly” desire for a grand, commemorative building is also spiritual, as he craves a cathedral.
Themes
Literary Devices
Olivares is the wealthiest sibling in a giant family. After spending much of his life in El Paso and New Orleans, Olivares had returned to Santa Fé with his second wife, the French-educated Doña Isabella. Doña Isabella is a devout Catholic, and she loves hosting priests at Olivares’s elaborate dinner parties. Latour and Isabella will often sing together, and there is always good food and lively conversation.
Isabella’s ability to balance regimented faith with lavish parties speaks to the kind of middle ground that Latour and Vaillant are still learning to strike, in which material pleasures catalyze spiritual ones instead of being in opposition to them.
Themes
Because Doña Isabella has maintained her youthful looks well into middle age, there is lots of gossip about her; people say that she has many lovers, and that she steals from her husband. But most of these rumors are started by the lady’s own servants, a way of adding to the mystique around their beloved mistress. And though she does not discourage the gossip, Isabella—like her husband—is perceptive. Every time Latour and Vaillant visit, Olivares gives them gifts: “something good for the eye” (like a silver toilet set) to Latour, “something good for the palate” to Vaillant.
As the two core priests expand their circle of friends, the narrative’s definition of friendship is similarly widened. With the Olivares family, friendship becomes about intimate personal knowledge and gift-giving, skills that Latour and Vaillant will later apply to their own bond.
Themes
Isabella and Olivares have one daughter, an unmarried woman (likely in her 40s) named Inez. Though Inez has never taken the vows of a nun, she lives like one, visiting from New Orleans once a year and spending the whole time in church with her mother. Therefore, Olivares’s interest in Latour’s cathedral is in part a gesture for Inez. The two men spend hours discussing how to fundraise and what the church should look like.
Though most of the concerns with legacy in the novel center on material projects or religious goals, Olivares’s focus on providing for Inez represents another way a person can extend their presence into the future. Unfortunately for the celibate Vaillant and Latour, this kind of parental legacy will never be possible.
Themes
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At one New Year’s party, Olivares announces his plan to raise enough money to start work in 1860, a decade after Latour arrived in Santa Fé. Latour remembers this evening fondly: Kit Carson had been there, and the military officers from the nearby Fort. Even Vaillant had dressed up in a new cassock, specially made by his sister Philomène. Making these clothes always made Philomène happy; every time she read a letter from her brother, she would look up the street in her small French village and picture that New Mexico was “just beyond the turn” in the road.
When Latour and Vaillant first arrived in New Mexico, they felt completely isolated, as if this remote location was divorced from the rest of the world. But now, they have an extended social network (one bound up in the government and bureaucracy of the new country), and they have also figured out ways to preserve ties with their Auvergne family, as is evidenced by Philomène’s cassock routine.
Themes
That night, Latour thought about how each man’s life shaped him. For example, Don Manuel Chavez, Olivares’s old friend, wore his history as an “Indian fighter” in his features. Chavez’s passion for this violence stemmed from his boyhood, when he engaged in a sport known as “Navajo hunting.” While on one of these excursions, Chavez and the other Mexican youths in his party had been apprehended by Navajos. Only Chavez had survived the skirmish, and despite his seven arrow wounds he had walked the 60 miles to safety. Now, Chavez lives in isolation, preferring to avoid Americans and American rule.
Like Kit Carson, Manuel Chavez is a real historical figure, and a version of the arrow wound story actually did occur. What the novel leaves out, however, is the complex role Chavez played in colonization, igniting tensions with a Navajo tribe that eventually led to the brutal ethnic cleansing known as the “Long Walk.” As a direct descendant of a Spanish conquistador, Chavez also represents the tensions between colonial powers; even as he enforces American dominance, he resents this new government, preferring the area’s original white settlers.
Themes
Shortly after that party, Olivares died, keeling over from a heart attack. While Latour was sent for to perform last rites, Olivares’s two brothers galloped to Albuquerque, hoping to hire an American lawyer and make off with the bulk of their brother’s money.
The fact that the brothers seek out an American lawyer points to the ever-shifting nature of this territory; after all, New Mexico has only recently come under U.S. jurisdiction, meaning that many of the laws that govern its citizens are unknown to the citizens themselves.
Themes
