Passion and Death in Bombal’s The Final Mist

Water imagery in Bombal’s The Final Mist (La última niebla) is also closely related to death and self-realization. The fog represents death while liquid water imagery represents the awakening of passion within the narrator. However, in confronting death and passion during her transformational journey, the narrator becomes resigned to living a live without passion, which, for the narrator represents an emotional death.

The nameless narrator of the novella marries her cousin, Daniel whose first wife died a year earlier. The two marry less out of love, and more out of necessity. Indeed, the narrator becomes so disillusioned with the marriage, and so keenly aware of the aura of death, also represented by the fog, which surrounds the house, that she constantly looks for ways to escape. She often goes into the woods, to bathe or commune with nature. Then, one night while they are in the city to pick up Daniel’s mother to come back to the house with them, she takes a walk where she encounters her lover. After consummating their love, the narrator returns home to Daniel and she, Daniel, and his mother go back to the house in the country. Here, the narrator is totally preoccupied with her lover. She thinks about him, writes about him, and seeks him constantly, until Daniel reveals to her that he never let her go for a walk that night in the city. The narrator returns to the city because Regina, Daniel’s sister, is in the hospital for attempting suicide while with her illicit lover. The narrator looks for the house where she and her lover slept together and cannot find it. By the end of the novel, she realizes that her ideal lover, is only imagined, and Daniel stops her from committing suicide. As a result, the narrator becomes resigned...

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...umplir con una infinidad de frivolidades amenas; para llorar por costumbre y sonreír por deber. Lo sigo para vivir correctamente, para morir correctamente, algún día. (95).)

The narrator accepts the fact that she must live the rest of her unfulfilling and undesirable life with Daniel. Finally, “Around us the fog settles over everything like a shroud.” (“Alrededor de nosotros, la niebla presta a las cosas un carácter de inmovilidad definitivo”; 47, 95). The narrator surrenders herself to the fog, the silence, and the death.

As a result of her transformational journey, the narrator has succumbed to madness because of her fantasies, death as a result of her confrontation with a life without passion, and resignation as a result of her acceptance of death. Water, the green-world token, leads her to passion and death, which for the narrator become one in the same.