Cathers Death Comes for the Archbishop - A Narrative :: Cather Death Comes for the Archbishop

Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop - A Narrative As I was gathering information on the World Wide Web for my discussion for class, I encountered snippets of the debate as to the classification of Cather's Death Comes for the Archbishop. Having "thumbed through" a few arguments and some reader responses to her books and having read the work, I have come to a safe conclusion: If Cather would like her book remembered as a narrative, then we should respect her wishes and let it lie at that. The reason? It's not a novel. At least not a good one. Cather can write and what she did in DCA proves her talent. Her descriptions are intriguing and she can paint a wonderful landscape with words that any reader can feel completely encompassed in. Her characters are solid; you love them or hate them and you have a number of reasons to defend your position. All the bits and pieces of DCA are sound. No, the problem is not with her technical style so much as her overall composition. There's no plot. What Cather has essentially given us is a collection of anecdotes about a couple of Catholic priests spreading religion in newly acquired plots of American soil. It's true that by the end of the book, the stories ebb themselves together and remarkably even make a strong impression, however, the last quarter of a book is not the strongest locus to begin a plot. The reader would like a reason or even a clue or mild suggestion as to what the book is going to be about by the time he is half way through it. I was pretty sure it had something to do with those mules as they seemed to work themselves back into the story a number of times. (I was quite positive of this when the one time Father Latour decided not to take his pearl-colored mule on an emergency trip and instead opted for the larger army mule, it died in the snowstorm, thus saving noble Angelica.) Alas, it wasn't about the mules. One loose definition of a narrative is simply the telling of a series of events.