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Book 9: Chapter 7
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
At last, Latour is dying. On his death bed, he is attended by the new archbishop, Eusabio, Magdalena, Bernard, Fructosa, and Tranquilino. Bernard struggles to understand Latour’s last words, but they are not directed towards anyone in the room. Instead, they are aimed at Vaillant as he was on that night in France, torn between staying in his home country and heading to the New World.
Latour’s final moments, spent surrounded by friends and professional mentees, display even this more reserved priest’s capacity for forming lifelong bonds. But it is always Vaillant who matters most to Latour—and as Latour moves from life into death, he recalls the last time he made such a big transition, encouraging Vaillant as they decided to leave France forever.
Themes
When the bell tolls, announcing Latour’s death, American and Mexican Catholics alike fall to their knees, while Eusabio goes off to tell his people. The next day, “the old archbishop lay before the high altar in the church he had built.”
Though the final sentence of the novel is remarkably simple, everything about it reflects just how much of an impact Latour has left. He started the story as a bishop and ends as an archbishop; he came to Santa Fé as a stranger, and now its residents fall to their knees in respect. And most of all, Latour finds his resting place in the church he built—a legacy both worldly and spiritual, but a legacy guaranteed to last.
Themes
