57 pages • 1 hour read
Danya KukafkaNotes on an Execution
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2022A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 21-24Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 21 Summary: “Saffy”
In 2018, Saffy changes into a mourning dress. She gets a text from Blue, informing her that the execution is about to happen. Saffy declines to be present for it. Instead, she heads to a vigil for the murdered girls. A news crew is in attendance; Saffy is upset that they are there for the spectacle of Ansel. She thinks of Ansel receiving the lethal injection and knows that “the system has failed them all” (289).
After the vigil, Saffy returns to the police station, unable to stand going home to her empty house. Instead, she immerses herself in yet another case, missing 14-year-old Tanisha Jackson. Saffy believes that Tanisha is alive and that “not every girl must become a Girl” (290).
Chapter 22 Summary: “Hazel”
On the day of Ansel’s execution, Hazel and her mother review pre-execution paperwork before driving to the Walls Unit to witness his death. Hazel disagrees with the death penalty. Before his death, Ansel will get all the attention he wants, and then he will get to stop existing, freed from the consequences of his actions. She is sickened at the knowledge that some women will remember him with “bizarre, primitive lust” (293).
In the time since Jenny’s murder, Hazel has been hounded by the press, but the questions have never been about Jenny. Jenny’s murder is too routine, domestic violence too common; the journalists want to know about the other girls who were murdered. They prod her about Ansel’s motivations. The intricacies of Ansel’s pain don’t matter to Hazel, who is disgusted at the attention still paid to him after all these years.
In the bathroom at the Walls Unit, Hazel bumps into Blue. She asks why Blue came, and Blue says that “bad people feel pain, too” (297).
As Hazel proceeds into the witness room, she feels Jenny’s presence all around and within her. Hazel knows that Jenny will live on wherever she goes.
Chapter 23 Summary: “0”
It is time for Ansel’s execution. He is taken to a small room and strapped down on a gurney. He ponders the absurd cruelty of a system that supports murder. As the IVs are inserted into his arm, he remembers the girls he killed. For the first time, he thinks of all of them by name.
The curtain opens, revealing the witnesses. Ansel focuses on Blue, then on his own reflection. Though he accepts his guilt, he still believes that there is “a place for [him], in the category of personhood” (304). The warden brings him a microphone for his last statement, and he begs for another chance, promising to be good. His words are ignored.
The chemicals are injected, and painful fear rips through Ansel’s body. He prays to be reincarnated as a better, more whole creature. As the drugs take effect, a dark mass rises out of his chest. The mass is the evil within him, and as he looks at it, he is surprised by how small it seems.
For one moment, Ansel exists without the darkness and finally feels the goodness he has spent his life chasing. Then it’s over, and he dies.
Chapter 24 Summary: “Elsewhere”
Each of the missing girls details how they want to be remembered. Izzy wants to be thought of as she was as a teenager, tanning on her grandfather’s boat with her mother and siblings. Only Izzy’s sister Selena remembers her this way; the rest of the world only remembers her pain and the man who caused it.
If Angela had lived, she would have been an avid traveler, seeing every corner of the world. Her favorite country would have been Italy, where she would’ve visited the Amalfi Coast with her mother.
Lila would have had three children. Her third, Grace, would have grown up to be a zookeeper. One night Grace would have entered a leopard enclosure and fallen asleep next to a leopard, waking up unharmed to marvel at the mercy of the world.
Jenny would have become a labor and delivery nurse. Over her career, she would have delivered 6,552 babies. Jenny would have been the first person they saw. As she handed them to their mothers, she would have whispered to them, welcoming them to the world and reassuring them that “it’s good here” (310).
Chapters 21-24 Analysis
In these final chapters, Kukafka meditates on the ethics of the death penalty. Saffy and Hazel’s plotlines have established the horrifying impact of Ansel’s violence. Grief and trauma permeate their lives. The state considers death to be a fitting punishment for the devastation Ansel has wrought.
Yet Ansel has suffered too; as Blue says, bad people still feel pain. Kukafka renders Ansel’s final moments of grief and fear in raw detail, highlighting that he is vulnerable despite his crimes. Notes on an Execution has celebrated the beauty of human life and shown the immeasurable grief caused by murder. After so roundly condemning Ansel’s actions, the narrative cannot celebrate the “demented exercise” of killing a human being.
As Ansel prepares to die, he references the way that a diagnosis of psychopathy has been used to separate him from the rest of humanity. This separation provides a sense of safety to the general populace, a reassurance that humans couldn’t be capable of the worst kinds of evil. To kill, one must be a monster who can’t relate to normal human experiences. While comforting, this line of thought is not factual. Ansel’s brand of evil is not some unknown monstrosity but all too common, born of a combination of trauma, patriarchal entitlement, brain chemistry, and bad choices. Time and time again, he has been pushed away from society with no attempt to rehabilitate him. Isolating him from the rest of humanity only makes it harder to understand and prevent more crimes of the same type. Between Ansel and his victims, “the system has failed them all” (289).
Executions are ostensibly supposed to help victims’ families find closure, but Ansel’s death leaves Hazel feeling empty. Even though she wants to see Ansel’s crimes punished, Hazel believes death is an easy out. To her, real punishment is the “lonely, epic nothing” (293) of a life sentence without the status of martyr afforded by death. She laments that Ansel will gain more fame through his death, achieving the posthumous acclaim he wants.
Even decades after the crimes, the press is invested in the details of Ansel’s life. The women Ansel killed are considered interesting only in relation to him. Journalists discard Jenny as easily as Ansel did, declining to cover her story because the circumstances of her murder are too common to be interesting. Ansel gets the glory, the “privilege [of standing] in front of the cameras” (293). While the media’s treatment of Jenny is callous, it reflects a real potential consequence of true crime media. Viewing the details of crimes for entertainment can desensitize an audience to the real tragedy of these crimes. Notes on an Execution cautions readers to remember that behind every much-hyped serial killer are countless potentials destroyed and devastated families left behind.
While in the execution room, Ansel thinks of his victims for the first time not just as “Girls” but by name. This late moment of growth indicates that some level of rehabilitation may have been possible for Ansel if he received help earlier, a possibility strengthened by the visual of his inner darkness lifting out of his body. In his last few seconds, he exists as the man he could have been without the influence of the factors that made him cruel.
After unpacking all the possible reasons behind Ansel’s crimes, Kukafka concludes that it does not matter what drove him to it. There is no way to explain or justify murder. Ansel is just another in a long line of men who harm women, whether out of jealousy or desire or vengeance. Despite what the gathering journalists think, there is nothing worth analyzing about Ansel after his death. As Ansel himself says, “the good is…the stuff worth remembering” (304). Ansel’s legacy is grief, but the lives of his victims, both living and dead, are worth remembering.
Notes on an Execution closes with a chapter describing the lives that Ansel’s victims would have lived. The vignettes allow each woman a space in the narrative beyond her victimhood. Kukafka shows Angela, Izzy, Lila, and Jenny in happy moments that Ansel could not see and that the public will forget. Notes on an Execution closes with a reminder that Angela, Izzy, Lila, Hazel, Lavender, and Saffy are more than what Ansel took from them. Their stories are the ones that truly matter, even if they will never receive as much interest from the public as Ansel.
