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 16-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary: “Hazel”
In 2012, Hazel receives a call from her mother. Ansel has just been arrested for stabbing Jenny to death with a kitchen knife.
Hazel returns home for Jenny’s funeral. She is shell-shocked that such a “deeply average” man could have created so much grief. After the ceremony, she retrieves Lila’s ring from her glove compartment. She suddenly recalls Ansel digging a hole in her backyard the day after he gave Jenny the ring.
Hazel locates the raised earth beneath the maple tree and digs up a small box containing unfamiliar jewelry: a barrette and a pearl bracelet.
Chapter 17 Summary: “Saffy”
In 2012, Saffy receives the news of Ansel’s arrest. She feels overwhelming guilt for failing to save anyone.
The following day, Hazel appears at Saffy’s home and hands over the box of jewelry with Lila’s ring. Saffy’s guilt compounds as she wonders whether her interference in Ansel’s life turned him into “exactly the monster she needed him to be” (262). She is still haunted by visions of the lives that the murdered girls could have lived.
Saffy calls fellow detective Andrea Rollins for an update on the Packer case. Andrea says that the murder weapon is gone, and Ansel has wiped his car clean, so they need a confession. The following day, Saffy flies to Texas and confronts Ansel in an interrogation room. Sitting across from him, she thinks of how misleading crime TV shows are for portraying killers as masterminds. In person, Ansel is “a small and boring man who killed because he felt like it” (266).
Saffy probes Ansel about Jenny and Blue. She asks how it felt to kill; Ansel responds that it felt like nothing. The trinkets were supposed to keep him safe, but they failed. Ansel confesses to the 1990 murders and is promptly handcuffed. Saffy watches, disappointed that the heart of the mystery that has hounded her for so long is just an ordinary man who has dealt with his pain badly.
As Ansel is marched away, he asks whether Saffy believes in alternate universes. Saffy responds that “there is only this world” (271), and everyone must find a way to live in it.
Chapter 18 Summary: “Lavender”
In 2018, Lavender sits in the Blue House across from her granddaughter, who is now 23 years old. Their correspondence started a year ago with a letter from Blue, who got Lavender’s information from Cheryl. Since then, they have written steadily back and forth. Lavender asked about Ansel, and Blue agreed to tell her what she knew but warned that Lavender should hear the news in person.
At the diner, Blue delivers the news of Ansel’s crimes to Lavender. Ansel’s execution is scheduled for the following month, and Blue has agreed to be his witness because she only knew him as a good man. Lavender asks her to bring the locket.
Chapter 19 Summary: “18 Minutes”
Ansel recalls the interrogation. When he told Saffy his story, he felt that it was not the adult Ansel speaking but the little boy at the farmhouse. He confessed to set the child free.
Looking over his Theory one more time, Ansel considers his alternate universes. He thinks of the moments he chose to kill each girl and imagines what would have happened if he had acted differently.
Ansel remembers being held by Lavender as a toddler, resting in a field while looking up at a meteor shower. He starts to sob, grieving the fact that all 46 years of his life have led up to this. When his crying abates, prison officials arrive to escort him to the execution chamber.
Chapter 20 Summary: “Lavender”
Chapters 16-20 Analysis
In these chapters, Ansel accepts that he will be put to death. His façade of superiority crumbles as he reckons with the end of his life. The idea of Ansel as a glamorous figure is entirely shattered. He cries and spirals, expressing regret, though it’s still self-motivated rather than empathetic toward those he killed. While he wonders what would have happened to him had he not committed the murders, the vignettes in Saffy’s chapters answer by showing the full, happy lives he stole from Izzy, Angela, and Lila.
Kukafka reveals more detail about Jenny’s murder than the other three, including the fact that Ansel stabbed her with a kitchen knife. Her careful sidestepping of the more morbid details from Ansel’s previous crimes heightens the impact of Jenny’s brutal death. This choice encourages anger at Ansel as the narrative challenges readers to remain unbiased in evaluating the morality of his punishment.
As Ansel breaks down in the face of death, parallel chapters highlight the strength of the novel’s female characters, who cope with their trauma in healthier ways. Each woman shows bravery, kindness, and forgiveness, from Blue’s decision to witness Ansel’s execution to Hazel turning in the box of trinkets. Despite what has happened to them, they have not and will not intentionally harm other people. Their choices to be better than those who have hurt them distinguish them from Ansel.
After deconstructing the concept of a serial killer, Kukafka continues to reimagine the connotations of the title. Saffy is the character who has been most enthralled by Ansel, most drawn to dangerous and violent men. She has spent a decade chasing the idea of Ansel, playing a one-sided cat-and-mouse game with a man she assumed to be an evil genius. At work, Saffy sees a countless parade of women victimized by “brutal, unnecessarily savage” (223) violence and countless men getting away without justice. The possibility of discovering what makes a man like Ansel tick gives her a feeling of control over this cycle.
Saffy’s confrontation with Ansel is a high point of tension in the narrative. When she finally meets him face to face, she presses him for his motivations only to discover that he can’t explain himself. Bringing him to justice has been her sole focus for years. With so much time to build up a mythology around Ansel in her head, the reality of Saffy’s suspect can only be a disappointment. Following Ansel has been her way of exerting control over the violence she has experienced firsthand and seen every day at work, yet after his arrest, he has no answers for her. Ansel’s “pain [looks] just like everyone else’s,” and his crimes are banal except for the devastation they leave behind.
Ansel is a completely average man who’s only considered interesting because he killed four women, and he can’t even explain why he did it. Men like Ansel and their real-world counterparts are infinitely less worthy of attention than people who have suffered similar trauma and managed to remain kind. Saffy’s realization functions as a caution about engaging in the pedestalization of real serial killers created by “addictive and misleading” (265) crime media.
In prison, Ansel agonizes over alternative choices he could have made. It’s entirely possible that, with a different start, he could have been a different man, but as Saffy says, there is only one world. Ansel took universes of possibility away from four women and now he must answer to the consequences while everyone else finds a way to carry on with their lives.
