![]() ![]() It is a collage of the places, the people, the problems that he encounters in his early years in New Mexico, and finally a glimpse of his retirement, his contentment, his peaceful death. On this literal level, the book is what one would expect- an account of Bishop Latour’s work in the new territory. It is out of the “monotonous persistence” of the bishop and the tepid interest of the cardinals that the pro tagonist’s destiny is arranged. One is a pleading missionary bishop, and the others are cardinals who barely feign interest in the frontier Church in North America. In the same matter-of-fact tone with which she introduces the solitary horseman in New Mexico, Cather in the prologue has already introduced four dignitaries of the Roman Catholic Church dining in Rome. While unfolding a tale anchored in the prosaic spheres of when and where, she uses struc ture and myth to evoke more ethereal spheres. ’n But the measure of Willa Cather’s experiment in Death Comes for the Archbishop is that she seeks to involve the reader in the preter natural world of the miraculous without detaching him from the familiar sphere of history and geography. D I N N University of Notre Dame A Novelist’s Miracle: Structure and Myth In Death Comes For The Archbishop One hardly expects enchantment to begin, “One afternoon in the autumn of 1851. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: ![]()
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