Sister Helen Prejean

Character Analysis

Two Prejeans

Dead Man Walking is a memoir: it's a story in which the writer remembers stuff she did back in the past, before she wrote the book. So you could kind of say that Sister Helen Prejean, in the book, is really two characters.

The first character is the Prejean in the past, the one being remembered in the memoir. This is the nun who becomes pen pal to a Death Row inmate and learns about Death Row politics and morality as she goes along.

The second character is the Prejean doing the remembering. This is the author who is a committed death penalty activist trying to convince you that the death penalty is wrong. She does this partially by narrating her past experiences and showing you how those have led (by the end of the book) to the current commitment against the death penalty. Basically, we get a true story narrated by someone who's already learned a lot of lessons from that story.

You can see the split between these two Prejeans, and what this split means, especially clearly right at the beginning of the book. Past-tense Prejean has just been given Death Row inmate Patrick Sonnier's name, and she writes him a letter. She starts to think about his victims' families, too, and wishes she could do something to comfort them, as well. She assumes, though, that they would not want to talk to her.

Then the narrative switches: suddenly, we're listening not to Prejean in the past, but to Prejean in the present. She explains:

Later, Lloyd LeBlanc will berate me for not seeking him out at the beginning… And several years down the road Elizabeth and Vernon Harvey, whose daughter, Faith, was murdered by Robert Lee Willie (another death-row inmate whom I befriend) will bring me with them to victims' meetings and I will find a way to help the victims' families too. But not yet. (1.50)

That's a one-paragraph summary, in the first chapter, of the entire rest of the book. This isn't stuff that she could have known way back then, so you can tell that she's giving you her current perspective on things that happened in the past.

Fallible and All Knowing

So, why is that summary there? Well, for one thing, it allows Prejean to show that she is two characters—the Prejean in the past and the Prejean in the present. That helps make her character interesting: you know that, despite her commitment to social justice, and despite her religious faith, she is far from infallible. Instead, she is vulnerable and confused—she has major lessons to learn.

So remembered Prejean is someone worth reading about; she has things to learn and to teach. And remembering Prejean is more trustworthy, and more convincing, because you know she's learned things. Her convictions about the death penalty aren't things she came to suddenly, or offhand. They're ideas that she's had to work for.

Two Prejeans Into One Writer

As the book goes along, remembered Prejean and remembering Prejean come closer and closer together. The point where they seem to merge, or come close to merging, is at the end of chapter nine, the climax of the book, when Prejean witnesses the execution of Robert Lee Willie. Here she says, Robert "looks at me and winks, and then they strap his chin, lower the mask, and kill him. This time I do not close my eyes. I watch everything" (9.380).

This is a bitter moment: Prejean comes as close as she ever does to accusing the executioners of participating directly in murder themselves—they "kill him". But it's also the moment, it seems, when she embraces her role as watcher and witness. She does not close her eyes; she has decided that she is going to watch this, and record it, and tell about it. She doesn't explicitly say so, but you could see this as the instant she embraces her role as writer and memoirist—it's when remembered Prejean calls remembering Prejean into being, or decides that the Prejean who writes, and watches, will exist.

The memoir, then, is not just about how Prejean becomes committed to working against the death penalty. It's about how she becomes committed to writing about the death penalty, and about how she becomes a writer and a witness for those who die violently, whether at the hands of the state or at the hands of murderers.

That may be why the book ends with a memory of David LeBlanc, one of Pat Sonnier's victims. Prejean describes how David's father, Lloyd, imagines "David at twenty, David at twenty-five, David getting married… grown-up David, a man like himself, whom he will never know" (11.157). Lloyd, like Prejean, is remembering and dreaming at the same time. It's as if by the act of writing, Prejean is both witnessing the past and trying to create a better future.