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Book 9: Chapter 5
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
In his final days, Latour thinks very little about death. Instead, he loses himself in memories, often struggling to come to when Bernard or Magdalena asks him a question. Latour feels that there is nothing much left for him: after all, most of his good friends, Kit Carson and Vaillant and Olivares, are dead.
Latour’s ability to reflect happily on his life, rather than feeling anxiety about the afterlife, show just how different he is from men like Martínez and Lucero. While those priests spent their final moments consumed with regret, Latour feels only pride, nostalgia, and the sadness of his friends’ absence.
Themes
One day, however, Latour is reunited with his old friend Eusabio. Eusabio remarks on the fast trains across the Southwest, and he and Latour share one last warm handshake. After Eusabio leaves, Latour reflects to Bernard that he has “lived to see two great wrongs righted”: the end of slavery, and “the Navajos restored to their own country.”
Latour’s growth has paralleled the United States’ expansion—so now it is fitting that, as he reflects on his own experiences, Latour must also think about his country’s arc. Latour’s explicit acknowledgment of the harms of slavery and indigenous displacement lays the groundwork for the final stretch of the novel, which reframes the seemingly bucolic narrative that has preceded it in more critical terms.
Themes
