In many ways, The Leopard is a story about grim death—not just the death of an individual, but the death of an entire social class. As he watches the Sicilian aristocracy fade away, Prince Fabrizio wonders about his own mortality and about what (if anything) he'll leave behind when he dies.
It's not an easy question to answer, especially considering that none of his daughters have any children and his son Paolo dies falling off a horse when he's young. On top of that, all his family's property gets divvied up as his daughters continue to pay their expenses without bringing in any new money. So after hundreds of years of power and luxury, the Salina family returns to the dust from which it came. It's kind of poetic. It almost makes you want to write a book about it. Oh right, someone already did.
Questions About Mortality
- What figure does Fabrizio see at the moment of his death? What do you think this figure symbolizes?
- What do we learn about time and mortality in the final scene of this entire novel? Please support your answer with specific evidence from the text.
- What does Fabrizio mean when he says that deep down, Sicilians crave death? How is this connected to the "laziness" that Fabrizio accuses them of?
Chew on This
In The Leopard, we find that death doesn't just happen to individuals. It happens to entire ways of life, which end up getting buried in the rubble of history.
In The Leopard, Lampedusa suggests that death is the ultimate end to all of the worrying and suffering of life. When our time finally comes, it can be just as much a relief as a tragedy.