46 pages • 1-hour read
Death Row
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Themes
The Ethics of Capital Punishment
While not an overtly political text, Death Row nonetheless invites readers to examine the ethics surrounding capital punishment through protagonist Talia’s experience awaiting execution. Talia’s experiences of isolation, dehumanizing treatment, and mental strain all illustrate the hardships of a capital sentence.
As Talia establishes the setting of the text in the early chapters, she also paints a clear picture of what life on death row is like. Talia makes the declarative statement in the opening lines: “It’s entirely possible that being on death row is worse than death […] The worst part about death row is the seclusion. Prisoners on death row are kept isolated from the rest of the prisoners” (7). The negative mental health effects of total isolation are a well-documented phenomenon, emphasizing to readers the extreme social segregation that death row inmates live within.
McFadden also includes details about the conditions of Talia’s imprisonment to emphasize other difficult aspects of her treatment, such as Talia spending “twenty-three hours of the day in this cell […] roughly the size of a parking space. Humans are not designed to be locked in a cage for 95 percent of the day” (7). The comparison of her cell to a “cage” draws attention to the dehumanizing aspects of death row, the ways in which inmates are often treated as less-than-human as a way to make their punishment seem more palatable or justified.
McFadden takes this comparison further when describing Talia’s conditions for leaving her cell: “Whenever I leave this cell, I am shackled. I am allowed to go into the yard for one hour each day, although I am put in a different cage within the yard. They treat me like a wild animal that could turn on them at any time” (8). The comparison to a “wild animal” is explicit here: the system views and treats Talia and the other death-row inmates as more like animals than people.
The most extreme part of her experience is what Talia faces at the very end, on her execution day. Her lawyer describes the process by which the state will execute her using lethal injection, which is actually three injections that work together to stop her heart beating. As Talia reflects,
It’s supposed to be more humane, but I have heard that, in reality, the protocol is akin to torture […] Even after the sedative enters my bloodstream, I will still be awake […] after the second injection, I won’t be able to move or speak as my heart beats erratically and the drugs work to kill me. It could last as long as fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes of torture. (57)
McFadden thus invites readers to consider the reality of this “humane” method of execution. By using the word “torture” twice in short succession, Talia presents execution as a prolonged and drawn-out process meant to impart maximum mental and physical suffering, once more raising the ethics of capital punishment.
The Fallibility of Perception
Through a series of plot twists and surprises, Death Row illustrates the fallibility of perception and the realization that, sometimes, one’s experience of reality does not align with the truth. Through Talia’s experiences in the text, McFadden illustrates how the fallibility of perception shapes one’s reality.
True to the psychological thriller genre, McFadden’s novels often employ a surprise plot twist at the end of the text, and Death Row is no exception. In Chapter 16, Talia becomes semi-conscious after a month-long coma, revealing that the entirety of the book up to this point has been a fabrication of Talia’s guilty conscience after nearly killing Noel in a fit of jealous rage. All the scenes in the prison, her time on death row, her failed appeals, are nothing more than a manifestation of her guilty conscience while her physical body remains comatose.
There are elements of foreshadowing in earlier chapters that allude to the fact that Talia’s perception is not what it seems. One example of this is the distant beeping that appears throughout the text— “I once again hear that distant beeping sound from somewhere within the prison walls” (23). Within the prison, Talia struggles to contextualize the beeping sound; when the text reveals that Talia has not been on death row, but in a coma following a car accident, the beeping now has a recognizable context as one of the many machines monitoring Talia’s medical condition: “The beeping has also become much louder. It always sounded distant when I heard it in the past, but now it feels like the source is right in the room with me. Directly above my head” (64).
Talia’s flawed perception is also demonstrated in her dreams throughout the narrative. At the end of each of these recollections, Noel says some version of, “There’s only one thing you need to do first […] Wake up” (13), which Talia perceives as him snapping her out of the dream, but in reality, is Noel trying to encourage Talia to wake up from her comatose state. These examples illustrate the power of perception as Talia’s mind struggles to contextualize everything around her while being unaware of the reality of her situation.
The Epilogue once again suggests that perception can be fallible, creating ambiguity even around the novel’s close. As Talia sits on her porch with Noel, she wonders why he cannot hear the fire alarm blaring from inside. This indicates that, in reality, Talia’s consciousness has slipped to another state somewhere between life and death: The “fire alarm” is really her vitals flatlining. When Talia’s body has finally slipped away, she experiences it as a real weight off her: “It’s like a terrible weight has been pressing on my chest, and now I have finally been… released” (68). Talia has, in a sense, been released, as her body is no longer suffering.
Though Talia dies as a result of her jealousy and decisions, McFadden gives her protagonist a somewhat happy ending, in which Talia’s perception is not of pain and suffering, but forgiveness and another chance to live alongside Noel, making different choices moving forward.
The Psychological Impacts of Trauma and Betrayal
A recurrent theme in Freida McFadden’s body of work is the psychological impacts of trauma and betrayal. Death Row is no different, as it explores how protagonist Talia’s past experiences of trauma and betrayal shape her decision-making, and thus, her larger life outcomes.
Talia establishes early on that she has a jealous streak and is not above revenge. She rationalizes spitting in the drink of her ex-boyfriend’s new girlfriend by explaining: “It was bad enough that he was cheating on me and that he ended what I’d thought was my best relationship to date” (11). Cheating is a clear trigger for Talia, as she provides more context for her extreme sensitivity to romantic betrayal: “When I was a teenager, my father died of a heart attack in the bed of another woman, an unfortunate occurrence that pretty much scarred me for life” (22). Her father’s infidelity and death are inextricably linked for Talia: She cannot think of betrayal or unfaithfulness without conjuring the memory of her deceased father’s original infidelity.
Talia carries this trauma with her, and it shapes her relationships moving forward, especially when it comes to her relationship with Noel. Talia even experiences murderous rage toward a young woman talking to Noel at a party: “I want to reach out and strangle her with my bare hands. I want to choke her until she dies, and then bury her body in the backyard” (32). Talia’s feelings toward the woman go beyond jealousy, tipping into the realm of wanting to inflict actual bodily harm. She tries to rationalize these tendencies to herself by telling herself that it is only because she loves her husband so much: “I love him so much that the thought of him ever being unfaithful to me is unbearable. If he ever did something like that…” (34). However, the latter half of this quote indicates that Talia would not spare Noel were he to repeat Talia’s father’s mistakes.
The trauma Talia carries shapes her decision-making when she eventually suspects Noel of cheating, setting off a course of events that land her on “death row,” which is really nothing more than a figment of Talia’s guilty imagination while in a coma. As Talia reflects, “I have so many regrets. I shouldn’t have allowed my jealousy to get the better of me,” and admits she needs to “tak[e] responsibility for [her] own actions” (57-58). Here, Talia acknowledges her culpability in the murder plot, going even a step further and refusing to place all of the blame on her past trauma. She points out here that while her father’s betrayal created Talia’s psychological trauma, she is still responsible for acting on her unhealthy feelings.
Thus, much of the novella takes the form of flashbacks or memories between Talia and Noel, and in each, she has to relive her errors: “Even if he had been cheating on me—which he wasn’t—I should not have done it. I have woken up every night this week from nightmares where I relived that final day. I see myself making all the same mistakes, and I am helpless to stop it from happening” (58). As Talia succumbs to injuries sustained in the accident, Death Row reveals that trauma can manifest in decisions that have far-reaching impacts on one’s life.
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