Hannah Kent's Burial Rites

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Burial Rites, written by Australian author Hannah Kent, is an historical novel based on the true story of the life and death of Agnes Magnusdottir, the last person to be executed in Iceland, in 1830. “To know what a person has done, and to know who a person is, are very different things.” To help create this distinction, Kent has made several authorial choices including interchanging between first and third person, Agnes’ interactions with other characters such as Margret, Steina and Blondal, as well as the comparison between historical documents and the narrative style of the novel.

The main writing style Kent has employed to help create this distinction is the combination of first and third person narrative. This allows the reader to get …show more content…
This analysis has been attached to Agnes since her early days, and seemed to only be reiterated to the villagers after she killed Natan. Steina is a character that allows us to see Agnes in a different light. ‘I remember how kind you were’ shows us that she sees Agnes as more of an acquaintance rather than a servant. In contrast, her sister Lauga sternly says to Steina that ‘she’s nothing like us’. This shows us the difference of opinion between the two girls: Lauga sees Agnes as a hardened criminal and can’t be persuaded to think any other way. Margret, the girls’ mother, is a character that has a drastic change of heart towards her opinion of Agnes since the beginning of the novel. By the end, and after Agnes has confided within Margret about the truth of the murders, she comes to see that Agnes is ‘not a monster’ and should not be executed: ‘it wasn’t her fault’. It is through the alternation between first and third person narrative that we learn how others view Agnes, and how Agnes views herself, thus showing us the distinction between a person’s actions and a person’s …show more content…
The historical documents are placed at the start of each chapter. This has been done to provide context and facts regarding the actions of Agnes and her fellow accomplices, thus making readers feel hatred towards Ages before we get to know who she truly is. The Supreme Court Trials of 1829 document describes Natan as being ‘stabbed and thrashed to death with a knife and hammer.’ The wording in this document outlines the gruesome but very blunt details of the murder in the way officials seem to only view the situation. In other words, Blondal and various other important officials are only interested in the facts other crimes, the actions that the person has done, as opposed to giving any time to learning who a person is; two things that we know are very different. In addition to the historical documents, Kent also writes in the form of a
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