SOURCE: “Death Comes for the Archbishop: A Novel of Love & Death,” in New Mexico Quarterly, Vol. XXXVI, No. 4, Winter, 1966-67, pp. 389-403.

In the following essay, Charles maintains that the title of Death Comes for the Archbishop belies the novel's focus on life and Christian love.

Willa Cather's masterful novel, Death Comes for the Archbishop, contains a strikingly paradoxical relationship between the title, with its emphasis on death, and the story, with its stress on life and love. This subtle dichotomy of the human condition—love and death, Eros and Thanatos—affords, then, a basis upon which to examine the work.

Nearing the end of his life, the narrative's hero, Archbishop Latour, says to his young friend, Bernard Ducrot, “‘I shall not die of a cold, my son, I shall die of having lived’.”¹ One might well read there, ‘of having loved,’ for that is precisely what this...