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Each of the protagonists in the four works I discuss is on a platonic quest that takes her or him out of her or his subjective space and moves her or him toward an objective truth. Not every protagonist, however, is successful in her or his quest for objective truth.
Latour, in Death Comes for the Archbishop, starts out in his subjective cave of Catholicism in France, whose Catholic laws are dictated by Rome. He travels to New Mexico and finds that the Navajo faith represents a foundational truth that not only orders Navajo epistemology but orders the world as well. Latour confronts this truth and brings it to bear on his more objective understanding of Catholicism. Luhan's platonic quest in Edge of Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality brings her to the edge of her subjective cave of Euro-American privileged life, yet she struggles to move toward the Pueblo truth—an ideal truth that stands outside of her creation of it. She stays chained to the shadows of the images she has created. In Crazy Woman, Sara is chained inside the cave of patriarchy and Protestantism. She leaves this cave to find that the truth, for her, lies between the Jicarilla Apache and Western worlds. She