We are lucky to present you
Short Summaries of
the Books
You Have to Read in the course of
the English Literature by Stulov
Thursday, April 3 2002
Contents
1.
AN OVERVIEW OF THE DEVELOPMENT
FROM THE 17TH TO THE 20TH CENTURIES.................................. 2
2.
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.................................................................................................... 5
3.
ALL THE KING’S MEN............................................................................................................................. 13
4.
CATCH-22................................................................................................................................................ 22
5.
Catcher in the Rye............................................................................................................................. 31
6.
FAREWELL TO ARMS.............................................................................................................................. 35
7.
Grapes of Wrath................................................................................................................................ 41
8.
Great Gatsby...................................................................................................................................... 46
9.
Long Day's Journey Into the Night................................................................................................ 49
10. Moby Dick............................................................................................................................................. 53
11. Scarlet Letter................................................................................................................................... 63
12. Slaughterhouse Five........................................................................................................................ 67
13. Sound and the Fury........................................................................................................................... 73
14. Streetcar Named ”Desire”.............................................................................................................. 87
Like
other national literatures, American literature was shaped by the history of
the country that produced it. For almost a century and a half, America was
merely a group of colonies scattered along the eastern seaboard of the North
American continent--colonies from which a few hardy souls tentatively ventured
westward. After a successful rebellion against the motherland, America became
the United States, a nation. By the end of the 19th century this nation
extended southward to the Gulf of Mexico, northward to the 49th parallel, and
westward to the Pacific. By the end of the 19th century, too, it had taken its
place among the powers of the world--its fortunes so interrelated with those of
other nations that inevitably it became involved in two world wars and,
following these conflicts, with the problems of Europe and East Asia.
Meanwhile, the rise of science and industry, as well as changes in ways of thinking
and feeling, wrought many modifications in people's lives. All these factors in
the development of the United States molded the literature of the country.
The
17th century
American
literature at first was naturally a colonial literature, by authors who were
Englishmen and who thought and wrote as such. John Smith, a soldier of fortune,
is credited with initiating American literature. His chief books included A
True Relation of . . . Virginia . . . (1608) and The generall Historie of
Virginia, New England, and the Summer Isles (1624). Although these volumes
often glorified their author, they were avowedly written to explain colonizing
opportunities to Englishmen. In time, each colony was similarly described:
Daniel Denton's Brief Description of New York (1670), William Penn's Brief Account
of the Province of Pennsylvania (1682), and Thomas Ashe's Carolina (1682) were
only a few of many works praising America as a land of economic promise.Such
writers acknowledged British allegiance, but others stressed the differences of
opinion that spurred the colonists to leave their homeland. More important,
they argued questions of government involving the relationship between church
and state. The attitude that most authors attacked was jauntily set forth by
Nathaniel Ward of Massachusetts Bay in The Simple Cobler of Aggawam in America
(1647). Ward amusingly defended the status quo and railed at colonists who
sponsored newfangled notions. A variety of counterarguments to such a conservative
view were published. John Winthrop's Journal (written 1630-49) told
sympathetically of the attempt of Massachusetts Bay Colony to form a
theocracy--a state with God at its head and with its laws based upon the Bible.
Later defenders of the theocratic ideal were Increase Mather and his son
Cotton. William Bradford's History of Plymouth Plantation (through 1646) showed
how his pilgrim Separatists broke completely with Anglicanism. Even more
radical than Bradford was Roger Williams, who, in a series of controversial
pamphlets, advocated not only the separation of church and state but also the
vesting of power in the people and the tolerance of different religious
beliefs.The utilitarian writings of the 17th century included biographies,
treatises, accounts of voyages, and sermons. There were few achievements in
drama or fiction, since there was a widespread prejudice against these forms.
Bad but popular poetry appeared in the Bay Psalm Book of 1640 and in Michael
Wigglesworth's summary in doggerel verse of Calvinistic belief, The Day of Doom
(1662). There was some poetry, at least, of a higher order. Anne Bradstreet of
Massachusetts wrote some lyrics published in The Tenth Muse (1650), which movingly
conveyed her feelings concerning religion and her family. Ranked still higher
by modern critics is a poet whose works were not discovered and published until
1939: Edward Taylor, an English-born minister and physician who lived in Boston
and Westfield, Massachusetts. Less touched by gloom than the typical Puritan,
Taylor wrote lyrics that showed his delight in Christian belief and
experience.All 17th-century American writings were in the manner of British
writings of the same period. John Smith wrote in the tradition of geographic
literature, Bradford echoed the cadences of the King James Bible, while the
Mathers and Roger Williams wrote bejeweled prose typical of the day. Anne
Bradstreet's poetic style derived from a long line of British poets, including
Spenser and Sidney, while Taylor was in the tradition of such Metaphysical
poets as George Herbert and John Donne. Both the content and form of the
literature of this first century in America were thus markedly English.
The
18th century
In
America in the early years of the 18th century, some writers, such as Cotton
Mather, carried on the older traditions. His huge history and biography of
Puritan New England, Magnalia Christi Americana, in 1702, and his vigorous
Manuductio ad Ministerium, or introduction to the ministry, in 1726, were
defenses of ancient Puritan convictions. Jonathan Edwards, initiator of the
Great Awakening, a religious revival that stirred the eastern seacoast for many
years, eloquently defended his burning belief in Calvinistic doctrine--of the
concept that man, born totally depraved, could attain virtue and salvation only
through God's grace--in his powerful sermons and most notably in the
philosophical treatise Freedom of Will (1754). He supported his claims by
relating them to a complex metaphysical system and by reasoning brilliantly in
clear and often beautiful prose.But Mather and Edwards were defending a doomed
cause. Liberal New England ministers such as John Wise and Jonathan Mayhew
moved toward a less rigid religion. Samuel Sewall heralded other changes in his
amusing Diary, covering the years 1673-1729. Though sincerely religious, he
showed in daily records how commercial life in New England replaced rigid
Puritanism with more worldly attitudes. The Journal of Mme Sara Knight
comically detailed a journey that lady took to New York in 1704. She wrote
vividly of what she saw and commented upon it from the standpoint of an
orthodox believer, but a quality of levity in her witty writings showed that
she was much less fervent than the Pilgrim founders had been. In the South,
William Byrd of Virginia, an aristocratic plantation owner, contrasted sharply
with gloomier predecessors. His record of a surveying trip in 1728, The History
of the Dividing Line, and his account of a visit to his frontier properties in
1733, A Journey to the Land of Eden, were his chief works. Years in England, on
the Continent, and among the gentry of the South had created gaiety and grace
of expression, and, although a devout Anglican, Byrd was as playful as the
Restoration wits whose works he clearly admired.The wrench of the American
Revolution emphasized differences that had been growing between American and
British political concepts. As the colonists moved to the belief that rebellion
was inevitable, fought the bitter war, and worked to found the new nation's
government, they were influenced by a number of very effective political writers,
such as Samuel Adams and John Dickinson, both of whom favoured the colonists,
and Loyalist Joseph Galloway. But two figures loomed above these--Benjamin
Franklin and Thomas Paine.Franklin, born in 1706, had started to publish his
writings in his brother's newspaper, the New England Courant, as early as 1722.
This newspaper championed the cause of the "Leather Apron" man and
the farmer and appealed by using easily understood language and practical
arguments. The idea that common sense was a good guide was clear in both the
popular Poor Richard's almanac, which Franklin edited between 1732 and 1757 and
filled with prudent and witty aphorisms purportedly written by uneducated but
experienced Richard Saunders, and in the author's Autobiography, written
between 1771 and 1788, a record of his rise from humble circumstances that
offered worldly wise suggestions for future success.Franklin's self-attained
culture, deep and wide, gave substance and skill to varied articles, pamphlets,
and reports that he wrote concerning the dispute with Great Britain, many of
them extremely effective in stating and shaping the colonists' cause.Thomas
Paine went from his native England to Philadelphia and became a magazine editor
and then, about 14 months later, the most effective propagandist for the
colonial cause. His pamphlet "Common Sense" (January 1776) did much
to influence the colonists to declare their independence. "The American
Crisis" papers (December 1776-December 1783) spurred Americans to fight on
through the blackest years of the war. Based upon Paine's simple deistic
beliefs, they showed the conflict as a stirring melodrama with the angelic
colonists against the forces of evil. Such white and black picturings were
highly effective propaganda. Another reason for Paine's success was his poetic
fervour, which found expression in impassioned words and phrases long to be
remembered and quoted.
The
19th century
Early
19th-century literature
After
the American Revolution, and increasingly after the War of 1812, American
writers were exhorted to produce a literature that was truly native. As if in
response, four authors of very respectable stature appeared. William Cullen
Bryant, Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Edgar Allan Poe initiated
a great half century of literary development.Bryant, a New Englander by birth,
attracted attention in his 23rd year when the first version of his poem
"Thanatopsis" (1817) appeared. This, as well as some later poems, was
written under the influence of English 18th-century poets. Still later,
however, under the influence of Wordsworth and other Romantics, he wrote nature
lyrics that vividly represented the New England scene. Turning to journalism,
he had a long career as a fighting liberal editor of The Evening Post. He
himself was overshadowed, in renown at least, by a native-born New Yorker, Washington
Irving.Irving, youngest member of a prosperous merchant family, joined with
ebullient young men of the town in producing the Salmagundi papers (1807-08),
which took off the foibles of Manhattan's citizenry. This was followed by A
History of New York (1809), by "Diedrich Knickerbocker," a burlesque
history that mocked pedantic scholarship and sniped at the old Dutch families.
Irving's models in these works were obviously Neoclassical English satirists,
from whom he had learned to write in a polished, bright style. Later, having
met Sir Walter Scott and having become acquainted with imaginative German
literature, he introduced a new Romantic note in The Sketch Book (1819-20),
Bracebridge Hall (1822), and other works. He was the first American writer to
win the ungrudging (if somewhat surprised) respect of British critics.James
Fenimore Cooper won even wider fame. Following the pattern of Sir Walter
Scott's "Waverley" novels, he did his best work in the
"Leatherstocking" tales (1823-41), a five-volume series celebrating
the career of a great frontiersman named Natty Bumppo. His skill in weaving
history into inventive plots and in characterizing his compatriots brought him
acclaim not only in America and England but on the continent of Europe as
well.Edgar Allan Poe, reared in the South, lived and worked as an author and
editor in Baltimore, Philadelphia, Richmond, and New York City. His work was
shaped largely by analytical skill that showed clearly in his role as an
editor: time after time he gauged the taste of readers so accurately that
circulation figures of magazines under his direction soared impressively. It
showed itself in his critical essays, wherein he lucidly explained and
logically applied his criteria. His gothic tales of terror were written in
accordance with his findings when he studied the most popular magazines of the
day. His masterpieces of terror--"The Fall of the House of Usher"
(1839), "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842), "The Cask of
Amontillado" (1846), and others--were written according to a carefully worked
out psychological method. So were his detective stories, such as "The
Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), which historians credited as the first
of the genre. As a poet, he achieved fame with "The Raven" (1845).
His work, especially his critical writings and carefully crafted poems, had
perhaps a greater influence in France, where they were translated by Charles
Baudelaire, than in his own country.Two Southern novelists were also
outstanding in the earlier part of the century: John Pendleton Kennedy and
William Gilmore Simms. In Swallow Barn (1832), Kennedy wrote delightfully of
life on the plantations. Simms's forte was the writing of historical novels
like those of Scott and Cooper, which treated the history of the frontier and
his native South Carolina. The Yemassee (1835) and Revolutionary romances show
him at his best.
The
20th century
Writing
from 1914 to 1945
Important
movements in drama, poetry, fiction, and criticism took form in the years
before, during, and after World War I. The eventful period that followed the
war left its imprint upon books of all kinds. Literary forms of the period were
extraordinarily varied, and in drama, poetry, and fiction leading authors
tended toward radical technical experiments.Experiments in dramaAlthough drama
had not been a major art form in the 19th century, no type of writing was more
experimental than a new drama that arose in rebellion against the glib
commercial stage. In the early years of the 20th century, Americans traveling
in Europe encountered a vital, flourishing theatre; returning home, some of
them became active in founding the Little Theatre movement throughout the
country. Freed from commercial limitations, playwrights experimented with
dramatic forms and methods of production, and in time producers, actors, and
dramatists appeared who had been trained in college classrooms and community
playhouses. Some Little Theatre groups became commercial producers--for
example, the Washington Square Players, founded in 1915, which became the
Theatre Guild (first production in 1919). The resulting drama was marked by a
spirit of innovation and by a new seriousness and maturity.Eugene O'Neill, the
most admired dramatist of the period, was a product of this movement. He worked
with the Provincetown Players before his plays were commercially produced. His
dramas were remarkable for their range. Beyond the Horizon (first performed
1920), Anna Christie (1921), Desire Under the Elms (1924), and The Iceman
Cometh (1946) were naturalistic works, while The Emperor Jones (1920) and The
Hairy Ape (1922) made use of the Expressionistic techniques developed in German
drama in the period 1914-24. He also employed a stream-of-consciousness form in
Strange Interlude (1928) and produced a work that combined myth, family drama,
and psychological analysis in Mourning Becomes Electra (1931).No other
dramatist was as generally praised as O'Neill, but many others wrote plays that
reflected the growth of a serious and varied drama, including Maxwell Anderson,
whose verse dramas have dated badly, and Robert E. Sherwood, a Broadway
professional who wrote both comedy (Reunion in Vienna [1931]) and tragedy
(There Shall Be No Night [1940]). Marc Connelly wrote touching fantasy in a
Negro folk biblical play, The Green Pastures (1930). Like O'Neill, Elmer Rice
made use of both Expressionistic techniques (The Adding Machine [1923]) and
naturalism (Street Scene [1929]). Lillian Hellman wrote powerful, well-crafted
melodramas in The Children's Hour (1934) and The Little Foxes (1939). Radical
theatre experiments included Marc Blitzstein's savagely satiric musical The
Cradle Will Rock (1937) and the work of Orson Welles and John Houseman for the
government-sponsored Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Theatre
Project. The premier radical theatre of the decade was the Group Theatre
(1931-41) under Harold Clurman and Lee Strasberg, which became best known for
presenting the work of Clifford Odets. In Waiting for Lefty (1935), a stirring
plea for labour unionism, Odets roused the audience to an intense pitch of
fervour, and in Awake and Sing (1935), perhaps the best play of the decade, he
created a lyrical work of family conflict and youthful yearning. Other
important plays by Odets for the Group Theatre were Paradise Lost (1935),
Golden Boy (1937), and Rocket to the Moon (1938). Thornton Wilder used stylized
settings and poetic dialogue in Our Town (1938) and turned to fantasy in The
Skin of Our Teeth (1942). William Saroyan shifted his lighthearted, anarchic
vision from fiction to drama with My Heart's in the Highlands and The Time of
Your Life (both 1939).
Context
Samuel Clemens was born in Missouri in 1835. He grew up
in the town of Hannibal, Missouri, which would become the model for St.
Petersburg, the fictional town where Huckleberry Finn begins. Missouri was a
"slave state" during this period, and Clemens' family owned a few
slaves. In Missouri, most slaves worked as domestic servants, rather than on
the large agricultural plantations that most slaves elsewhere in the United
States experienced. This domestic slavery is what Twain generally describes in
Huckleberry Finn, even when the action occurs in the deep South. The
institution of slavery figures prominently in the novel and is important in
developing both the theme and the two most important characters, Huck and Jim.
Twain received a brief formal education, before going to
work as an apprentice in a print shop. He would later find work on a steamboat
on the Mississippi River. Twain developed a lasting afiection for the
Mississippi and life on a steamboat, and would immortalize both in Life on the
Mississippi (1883), and in certain scenes of Tom Sawyer (1876), and Huckleberry
Finn (1885). He took his pseudonym, "Mark Twain," from the call a
steamboat worker would make when the ship reached a (safe) depth of two
fathoms. Twain would go on to work as a journalist in San Francisco and Nevada
in the 1860s. He soon discovered his talent as a humorist, and by 1865 his humorous
stories were attracting national attention.
In 1870, Twain married Olivia Langdon of New York State.
The family moved to Hartford, Connecticut, to a large, ornate house paid for
with the royalties from Twain's successful literary adventures. At Hartford and
during stays with Olivia's family in New York State, Twain wrote The Gilded
Age, co-authored with Charles Dudley Warner in 1873 and The Prince and the
Pauper (1882), as well as the two books already mentioned. Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn was finally published in 1885. Twain had begun the book years earlier, but
the writing was done in spurts of inspiration interrupted by long periods
during which the manuscript sat in the author's desk. Despite the economic
crisis that plagued the United States then, the book became a huge popular and
financial success. It would become a classic of American literature and receive
acclaim around the world{today it has been published in at least twenty-seven
languages.
Still, at the time of publication, the author was
bothered by the many bad reviews it received in the national press. The book
was principally attacked for its alleged indecency. After the 1950s, the chief
attacks on the book would be against its alleged racism or racial bigotry. For
various reasons, the book frequently has been banned from US schools and
children's libraries, though it was never really intended as a children's book.
Nonetheless, the book has been widely read ever since its first publication
well over a century ago, an exception to Twain's definition of a classic as
"a book which people praise and don't read."
Characters
Huckleberry Finn { The protagonist and
narrator of the novel. Huck is the thirteen or fourteen year-old son of the
local drunk in the town of St. Petersburg, Missouri, at the start of the novel.
He is kidnapped by his father, Pap, from the "sivilizing" in uence of
the Widow Douglas and Miss Watson, and then fakes his own death to escape. He
meets Jim on Jackson's Island. The rest of the novel is largely motivated by
two conflicts: the external con ict to achieve Jim's freedom, and the internal
con ict within Huck between his own sense of right and wrong and society's.
Huck has a series of "adventures," making many observations on human
nature and the South as he does. He progressively rejects the values of the
dominant society and matures morally as he does. Jim { A slave who escaped from
Miss Watson after she considered selling him down river. He encounters Huck on
Jackson's Island, and the two become friends and spend most of the rest of the
novel together. Jim deeply grieves his separation from his wife and two
children and dreams of getting them back. He is an intensely human character,
perhaps the novel's most complex. Through his example, Huck learns to
appreciate the humanity of black people, overcoming his society's bigotry and
making a break with its moral code. Twain also uses him to demonstrate racial
equality. But Jim himself remains somewhat enigmatic; he seems both comrade and
father figure to Huck, though Huck, the youthful narrator, may not be able to thoroughly
evaluate his friend, and so the reader has to suppose some of his qualities.
The Duke and Dauphin { These two criminals
appear for much of the novel. Their real names are never given, but the younger
man, about thirty years old, claims to be the Duke of Bridgewater, and is
called both "the Duke" and "Bridgewater" in the novel,
though for the sake of clarity, he is only called "the Duke" here.
The much older man claims to be the son of Louis XVI, the executed French king.
"Dauphin" was the title given to heirs to the French throne. He is
mostly called "the king" in the novel (since his father is dead, he
would be the rightful king), though he is called "the Dauphin" in
this study guide since the name is more distinctive. The two show themselves to
be truly bad when they separate a slave family at the Wilks household, and
later sell Jim.
Tom Sawyer { Huck's friend, and the protagonist
of Tom Sawyer, the novel for which Huckleberry Finn is ostensibly the sequel.
He is in many ways Huck's foil, given to exotic plans and romantic adventure
literature, while Huck is more down-to-earth. He also turns out to be
profoundly selfish.
On the whole, Tom is identified with the
"civilzation" from which Huck is alienated. Other characters, in
order of appearance Widow Douglas and Miss Watson { Two wealthy sisters who
live together in a large house in St. Petersburg. Miss Watson is the older
sister, gaunt and severe-looking. She also adheres the strongest to the hypocritical
religious and ethical values of the dominant society. Widow Douglas, meanwhile,
is somewhat gentler in her beliefs and has more patience with the mischievous
Huckleberry. She adopted Huck at the end of the last novel, Tom Sawyer, and he
is in her care at the start of Huckleberry Finn. When Miss Watson considers
selling Jim down to New Orleans, away from his wife and children and deep into
the plantation system, Jim escapes. She eventually repents, making provision in
her will for Jim to be freed, and dies two months before the novel ends.
Pap { Huckleberry's father and the town
drunk and ne'er- do-well. When he appears at the beginning of the novel, he is
a human wreck, his skin a disgusting ghost-like white, and his clothes
hopelessly tattered. Like Huck, he is a member of the least privileged class of
whites, and is illiterate. He is angry that his son is getting an education. He
wants to get hold of Huck's money, presumably to spend it on alcohol. He
kidnaps Huck and holds him deep in the woods. When Huck fakes his own murder,
Pap is nearly lynched when suspicions turn his way. But he escapes, and Jim
eventually finds his dead body on an abandoned houseboat.
Judge Thatcher { Judge Thatcher is in
charge of safeguarding the money Huck and Tom won at the end of Tom Sawyer.
When Huck discovers his father has come to town, he wisely signs his fortune
over to the Judge. Judge Thatcher has a daughter, Becky, whom Huck calls
"Bessie."
Aunt Polly { Tom Sawyer's aunt and
guardian. She appears at the end of Huckleberry Finn and properly identifies
Huck, who has pretended to be Tom; and Tom, who has pretended to be his
brother, Sid (who never appears in this novel).
The Grangerfords { The master of the
Grangerford clan is "Colonel"Grangerford, who has a wife. The children
are Bob, the oldest, then Tom, then Charlotte, aged twenty- five, Sophia,
twenty, and Buck, the youngest, about thirteen or fourteen. They also had a
deceased daughter, Emme- line, who made unintentionally humorous, maudlin
pictures and poems for the dead. Huckleberry thinks the Grangerfords are all
physically beautiful. They live on a large estate worked by many slaves. Their
house is decked out in humorously tacky finery that Huckleberry innocently
admires. The Grangerfords are in a feud with the Shepardsons, though no one can
remember the cause of the feud or see any real reason to continue it. When
Sophia runs off with a Shepardson, the feud reignites, and Buck and another boy
are shot. With the Grangerfords and the Shepardsons, Twain illustrates the
bouts of irrational brutality to which the South was prone.
The Wilks Family { The deceased Peter Wilks
has three daughters, Mary Jane, Susan, and Joanne (whom Huck calls "the
Harelip"). Mary Jane, the oldest, takes charge of the sisters' afiairs.
She is beautiful and kind- hearted, but easily swindled by the Duke and
Dauphin. Susan is the next youngest. Joanna possess a cleft palate (a birth
defect) and so Huck somewhat tastelessly refers to her as "the Hare
Lip" (another name for cleft palate). She initially suspects Huck and the
Duke and Dauphin, but eventually falls for the scheme like the others.
The Phelps family { The Phelps family
includes Aunt Sally, Uncle Silas and their children. They also own several
slaves. Sally and Silas are generally kind-hearted, and Silas in particular is
a complete innocent. Tom and Huck are able to continue playing pranks on them
for quite some time before they suspect anything is wrong. Sally, however,
displays a chilling level of bigotry toward blacks, which many of her fellow
Southerners likely share. The town
in which they live also cruelly kills the Duke and
Dauphin. With the Phelps, Twain contrasts the good side of Southern
civilization with its bad side.
Summary
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn was finally published in
1885. Twain had begun the book years earlier, but the writing was done in
spurts of inspiration interrupted by long periods during which the manuscript
sat in the author's desk. Despite the economic crisis that plagued the United
States then, the book became a huge popular and financial success. It would
become a classic of American literature and receive acclaim around the
world{today it has been published in at least twenty-seven languages.
Still,
at the time of publication, the author was bothered by the many bad reviews it
received in the national press. The book was principally attacked for its
alleged indecency. After the 1950s, the chief attacks on the book would be
against its alleged racism or racial bigotry. For various reasons, the book
frequently has been banned from US schools and children's libraries, though it
was never really intended as a children's book. Nonetheless, the book has been
widely read ever since its first publication well over a century ago, an
exception to Twain's definition of a classic as "a book which people praise
and don't read."
Chapter
1 Summary
The narrator (later identified as Huckleberry Finn)
begins Chapter One by stating that the reader may know of him from another
book, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by "Mr. Mark Twain," but it
"ain't t no matter" if you have not. According to Huck, Twain mostly
told the truth, with some "stretchers" thrown in, though
everyone{except Tom's Aunt Polly, the widow, and maybe Mary{lies once in a
while. The other book ended with Tom and Huckleberry finding the gold some
robbers had hidden in a cave. They got six thousand dollars apiece, which Judge
Thatcher put in trust, so that they each got a dollar a day from interest. The
Widow Douglas adopted and tried to "civilise" Huck. But Huck couldn't
stand it so he threw on his old rags and ran away. But he went back when Tom
Sawyer told him he could join his new band of robbers if he would return to the
Widow "and be respectable."
The Widow lamented over her failure with Huck, tried to
stufi him into cramped clothing, and before every meal had to
"grumble" over the food before they could eat it. She tried to teach
him about Moses, until Huck found out he was dead and lost interest. Meanwhile,
she would not let him smoke; typically, she disapproved of it because she had
never tried it, but approved of snufi since she used it herself. Her slim
sister who wears glasses, Miss Watson, tried to give him spelling lessons.
Meanwhile, Huck was going stir-crazy, made especially
restless by the sisters' constant reminders to improve his behavior. When Miss
Watson told him about the "bad place," Hell, he burst out that he
would like to go there, as a change of scenery. Secretly, Huck really does not
see the point in going to "the good place" and resolved then not to
bother trying to get there.
When
Huck asked, Miss Watson told him there was no chance Tom Sawyer would end up in
Heaven. Huck was glad "because I wanted him and me to be together."
One night, after Miss Watson's prayer session with him and the slaves, Huck
goes to bed feeling "so lonesome I wished I was dead." He gets
shivers hearing the sounds of nature through his window. Huck accidentally icks
a spider into a candle, and is frightened by the bad omen. Just after midnight,
Huck hears movement below the window, and a "me-yow" sound, that he
responds to with another "me-yow." Climbing out the window onto the
shed, Huck finds Tom Sawyer waiting for him.
Chapters
2-3 Summary
Huck and Tom tiptoe through the garden. Huck trips on a
root as he passes the kitchen. Jim, a "big" slave, hears him from
inside. Tom and Huck crouch down, trying to stay still. But Huck is struck by
an uncontrollable itch, as always happens when he is in a situation, like when
he's "with the quality," where it is bad to scratch. Jim says aloud
that he will stay put until he discovers the source of the sound, but after
several minutes falls asleep. Tom plays a trick on Jim{putting his hat on a
tree branch over his head{and takes candles from the kitchen, over Huck's
objections that they will risk getting caught. Later, Jim will say that some
witches ew him around the state and put the hat above his head as a calling
card. He expands the tale further, becoming a local celebrity among the slaves,
who enjoy witch stories. He wears around his neck the five-cent piece Tom left for
the candles, calling it a charm from the devil with the power to cure sickness.
Jim nearly becomes so stuck-up from his newfound celebrity that he is unfit to
be a servant.
Meanwhile, Tom and Huck meet up with a few other boys,
and take a boat to a large cave. There, Tom declares his new band of robbers,
"Tom Sawyer's Gang." All must sign in blood an oath vowing, among
other things, to kill the family of any member who reveals the gang's secrets.
The boys think it "a real beautiful oath." Tom admits he got part of
it from books. The boys nearly disqualify Huck, who has no family but a drunken
father who can never be found, until Huck offers Miss Watson. Tom says the gang
must capture and ransom people, though nobody knows what "ransom"
means.
Tom assumes it means to kill them. But anyway, it must be
done since all the books say so. When one boy cries to go home and threatens to
tell the group's secrets, Tom bribes him with five cents. They agree to meet
again someday, just not Sunday, which would be blasphemous. Huckleberry makes
it back into bed just before dawn.
Miss Watson tries to explain prayer to Huckleberry in
Chapter Three. Huckleberry gives up on it after not getting what he prays for.
Miss Watson calls him a fool, and explains prayer bestows spiritual gifts like
sel essness to help others. Huck cannot see any advantage in this, except for
the others one helps. So he resolves to forget it. Widow Douglas describes a
wonderful God, while Miss Watson's is terrible. Huck concludes there are two
Gods. He would like to belong to Widow Douglas's, if He would take him –
unlikely because of Huck's bad qualities.
Meanwhile, a rumor circulates that Huck's Pap, who has
not been seen in a year, is dead. A corpse was found in the river, thought to
be Pap because of its "ragged" appearance, though the face is
unrecognizable. At first Huck is relieved. His father had been a drunk who beat
him when he was sober, though Huck stayed hidden from him most of the time.
Soon, however, Huck doubts his father's death, and expects to see him again.
After
a month in Tom's gang, Huck quit along with the rest of the boys. There was no
point to it, without any robbery or killing, their activities being all
pretend. Once, Tom pretended a caravan of Arabs and Spaniards were going to
encamp nearby with hundreds of camels and elephants. It turned out to be a
Sunday school picnic. Tom explained it really was a caravan of Arabs and
Spaniards - only they were enchanted, like in Don Quixote. Huckleberry judged
Tom's stories of genies to be lies, after rubbing old lamps and rings with no
result.
Chapters
4-6 Summary
In Chapter Four, Huckleberry is gradually adjusting to
his new life, and even making small progress in school. One winter morning,
Huck notices boot tracks in the snow near the house. Within one heel print is
the shape of two nails crossed to ward off the devil. Huck runs to Judge
Thatcher, looking over his shoulder as he does. He sells his fortune to the
surprised Judge for a dollar. That night Huck goes to Jim, who has a magical
giant hairball from an ox's stomach. Huck tells Jim he found Pap's tracks in
the snow and wants to know what his father wants. Jim says the hairball needs
money to talk, and so Huck gives a counterfeit quarter. Jim puts his ear to the
hairball, and relates that Huck's father has two angels, one black and one
white, one bad, one good. It is uncertain which will win out. But Huck is safe
for now. He will have much happiness and much sorrow in his life, will marry a
poor and then a rich woman, and should stay clear of the water, since that is
where he will die. That night, Huck finds Pap waiting in his bedroom!
Pap's long, greasy, black hair hangs over his face. The
nearly fifty-year-old man's skin is a ghastly, disgusting white. Noticing
Huck's "starchy" clothes, Pap wonders aloud if he thinks himself
better than his father, promising to take him "down a peg." Pap
promises to teach Widow Douglas not to "meddle" and make a boy
"put on airs over his own father." Pap is outraged that Huck has
become the first person in his family to learn to read. He threatens Huck not
to go near the school again. He asks Huck if he is really rich, as he has
heard, and calls him a liar when he says he has no more money.
He takes the dollar Huck got from Judge Thatcher. He
leaves to get whiskey, and the next day, drunk, demands Huck's money from Judge
Thatcher. The Judge and Widow Douglas try to get custody of Huck, but give up
after the new judge in town refuses to separate a father from his son. Pap
lands in jail after a drunken spree. The new judge takes Pap into his home and
tries to reform him. Pap tearfully repents his ways but soon gets drunk again.
The new judge decides Pap cannot be reformed except with a shotgun.
Pap sues Judge Thatcher for Huck's fortune. He also
continues to threaten Huck about attending school, which Huck does partly to
spite his father. Pap goes on one drunken binge after another. One day he
kidnaps Huck and takes him deep into the woods, to a secluded cabin on the
Illinois shore. He locks Huck inside all day while he goes out. Huck enjoys
being away from civilization again, though he does not like his father's
beatings and his drinking. Eventually, Huck finds an old saw hidden away. He
slowly makes a hole in the wall while his father is away, resolved to escape
from both Pap and the Widow Douglas. But Pap returns as Huck is about to
finish. He complains about the "govment," saying Judge Thatcher has
delayed the trial to prevent Pap from getting Huck's wealth. He has heard his
chances are good, though he will probably lose the fight for custody of Huck.
He further rails against a biracial black visitor to the town. The visitor is
well dressed, university- educated, and not at all deferential. Pap is
disgusted that the visitor can vote in his home state, and that legally he
cannot be sold into slavery until he has been in the state six months. Later,
Pap wakes from a drunken sleep and chases after Huck with a knife, calling him
the "Angel of Death," stopping when he collapses in sleep. Huck holds
the ri e against his sleeping father and waits.
Chapters 7-10 Summary
Huck falls asleep, to be awakened by Pap, who is unaware
of the night's events. Pap sends Huck out to check for fish. Huck finds a canoe
drifting in the river and hides it in the woods. When Pap leaves for the day,
Huck finishes sawing his way out of the cabin. He puts food, cookware,
everything of value in the cabin, into the canoe. He covers up the hole in the
wall and then shoots a wild pig. He hacks down the cabin door, hacks the pig to
bleed onto the cabin's dirt oor, and makes other preparations so that it seems
robbers came and killed him. Huck goes to the canoe and waits for the moon to
rise, resolving to canoe to Jackson's Island, but falls asleep. When he wakes
he sees Pap row by. Once he has passed, Huck quietly sets out down river. He
pulls into Jackson's Island, careful not to be seen.
The next morning in Chapter Eight, a boat passes by with
Pap, Judge and Becky Thatcher, Tom Sawyer, his Aunt Polly, some of Huck's young
friends, and "plenty more" on board, all discussing the murder. They
shoot cannon over the water and oat loaves of bread with mercury inside, in
hopes of locating Huck's corpse. Huck, careful not to be seen, catches a loaf
and eats it.
Exploring the island, Huck is delighted to find Jim, who
at first thinks Huck is a ghost. Now Huck won't be lonely anymore. Huck is
shocked when Jim explains he ran away. Jim overheard Miss Watson discussing
selling him for eight hundred dollars, to a slave trader who would take him to
New Orleans. He left before she had a chance to decide. Jim displays a great
knowledge of superstition. He tells Huck how he once "speculated" ten
dollars in (live)stock, but lost most of it when the steer died. He then lost
five dollars in a failed slave start-up bank. He gave his last ten cents to a
slave, who gave it away after a preacher told him that charity repays itself
one-hundred-fold. It didn't. But Jim still has his hairy arms and chest, a
portent of future wealth. He also now owns all eight-hundred- dollars' worth of
himself.
In Chapter Nine, Jim and Huck take the canoe and
provisions into the large cavern in the middle of the island, to have a hiding
place in case of visitors, and to protect their things. Jim predicted it would
rain, and soon it downpours, with the two safely inside the cavern. The river
oods severely.
A washed-out houseboat oats down the river past the
island. Jim and Huck find a man's body inside, shot in the back. Jim prevents
Huck from looking at the face; it's too "ghastly." They make off with
some odds and ends. Huck has Jim hide in the bottom of the canoe so he won't be
seen. They make it back safely to the cave.
In Chapter Ten, Huck wonders about the dead man, though
Jim warns it's bad luck. Sure enough, bad luck comes: as a joke, Huck puts a
dead rattlesnake near Jim's sleeping place, and its mate comes and bites Jim.
Jim's leg swells, but after four days it goes down. A while later, Huck decides
to go ashore and to find out what's new. Jim agrees, but has Huck disguise himself
as a girl, with one of the dresses they took from the houseboat.
Huck practices his girl impersonation, then sets out for
the Illinois shore. In a formerly abandoned shack, he finds a woman who looks
forty, and also appears a newcomer. Huck is relieved she is a newcomer, since
she will not be able to recognize him.
Chapters 11-13 Summary
The woman eyes Huckleberry somewhat suspiciously as she
lets him in. Huck introduces himself as "Sarah Williams," from
Hookerville. The woman "clatters on," eventually getting to Huck's
murder. She reveals that Pap was suspected and nearly lynched, but people came
to suspect Jim, since he ran away the same day Huck was killed. There is a
three- hundred-dollar price on Jim's head. But soon, suspicions turned again to
Pap, after he blew money the judge gave him to find Jim on drink. But he left
town before he could be lynched, and now there is two hundred dollars on his
head. The woman has noticed smoke over on Jackson's Island, and, suspecting
that Jim might be hiding there, told her husband to look. He will go there
tonight with another man and a gun. The woman looks at Huck suspiciously and
asks his name.
He replies, "Mary Williams." When the woman
asks about the change, he covers himself, saying his full name is "Sarah
Mary Williams." She has him try to kill a rat by pitching a lump of lead
at it, and he nearly hits. Finally, she asks him to reveal his (male) identity,
saying she understands that he is a runaway apprentice and will not turn him
in. He says his name is George Peters, and he was indeed apprenticed to a mean
farmer. She lets him go after quizzing him on farm subjects, to make sure he's
telling the truth. She tells him to send for her, Mrs. Judith Loftus, if he has
trouble. Back at the island, Huck tells Jim they must shove off, and they
hurriedly pack their things and slowly ride out on a raft they had found.
Huck and Jim build a wigwam on the raft in Chapter
Twelve. They spend a number of days drifting down river, passing the great
lights of St. Louis on the fifth night. They "lived pretty high,"
buying, "borrowing", or hunting food as they need it. One night they
come upon a wreaked steamship. Over Jim's objections, Huck goes onto the wreck,
to loot it and have an "adventure," the way Tom Sawyer would. On the wreck,
Huck overhears two robbers threatening to kill a third so that he won't
"talk."
One of the two manages to convince the other to let their
victim be drowned with the wreck. They leave. Huck finds Jim and says they have
to cut the robbers' boat loose so they can't escape. Jim says that their own
raft has broken loose and oated away. Huck and Jim head for the robbers' boat
in Chapter Thirteen. The robbers put some booty in the boat, but leave to get
some more money off the man on the steamboat. Jim and Huck jump right into the
boat and head off as quietly as possible. A few hundred yards safely away, Huck
feels bad for the robbers left stranded on the wreck since, who knows, he may
end up a robber himself someday. They find their raft just before they stop for
Huck to go ashore for help. Ashore, Huck finds a ferry watchman, and tells him
his family is stranded on the steamboat wreck. The watchman tell him the wreck
is of the Walter Scott. Huck invents an elaborate story as to how his family
got on the wreck, including the niece of a local big shot among them, so that
the man is more than happy to take his ferry to help. Huck feels good about his
good deed, and thinks Widow Douglas would have been proud of him. Jim and Huck
turn into an island, and sink the robbers' boat before going to bed.
Chapters 14-16 Summary
Jim and Huck find a number of valuables among the
robbers' booty in Chapter Fourteen, mostly trinkets and cigars. Jim says he
doesn't enjoy Huck's "adventures," since they risk his getting
caught. Huck recognizes that Jim is intelligent, at least for what Huck thinks
of a black person. Huck astonishes Jim with his stories of kings. Jim had only
heard of King Solomon, whom he considers a fool for wanting to chop a baby in
half. Huck cannot convince Jim otherwise. Huck also tells Jim about the
"dolphin," son of the executed King Louis XVI of France, rumored to
be wandering America. Jim is incredulous when Huck explains that the French do
not speak English, but another language. Huck tries to argue the point with
Jim, but gives up in defeat.
Huck and Jim are nearing the Ohio River, their goal, in
Chapter Fifteen. But one densely foggy night, Huck, in the canoe, gets
separated from Jim and the raft. He tries to paddle back to it, but the fog is
so thick he loses all sense of direction. After a lonely time adrift, Huck is
reunited with Jim, who is asleep on the raft. Jim is thrilled to see Huck
alive. But Huck tries to trick Jim, pretending he dreamed their entire
separation. Jim tells Huck the story of his dream, making the fog and the
troubles he faced on the raft into an allegory of their journey to the free
states. But soon Jim notices all the debris, dirt and tree branches, that
collected on the raft while it was adrift.
He gets mad at Huck for making a fool of him after he had
worried about him so much. "It was fifteen minutes before I could work
myself up to go and humble myself to a nigger," but Huck apologizes, and
does not regret it. He feels bad about hurting Jim. Jim and Huck hope they
don't miss Cairo, the town at the mouth of the Ohio River, which runs into the
free states. Meanwhile, Huck's conscience troubles him deeply about helping Jim
escape from his "rightful owner," Miss Watson, especially after her
consideration for Huck. Jim can't stop talking about going to the free states,
especially about his plan to earn money to buy his wife and children's freedom,
or have some abolitionists kidnap them if their masters refuse. When they think
they see Cairo, Jim goes out on the canoe to check, secretly resolved to give
Jim up. But his heart softens when he hears Jim call out that he is his only
friend, the only one to keep a promise to him. Huck comes upon some men in a
boat who want to search his raft for escaped slaves. Huck pretends to be grateful,
saying no one else would help them. He leads them to believe his family, on
board the raft, has smallpox. The men back away, telling Huck to go further
downstream and lie about his family's condition to get help. They leave forty
dollars in gold out of pity. Huck feels bad for having done wrong by not giving
Jim up.
But he realizes that he would have felt just as bad if he
had given Jim up. Since good and bad seem to have the same results, Huck
resolves to disregard morality in the future and do what's
"handiest." Floating along, they pass several towns that are not
Cairo, and worry that they passed it in the fog. They stop for the night, and
resolve to take the canoe upriver, but in the morning it is gone{ more bad luck
from the rattlesnake. Later, a steamboat drives right into the raft, breaking
it apart. Jim and Huck dive off in time, but are separated. Huck makes it
ashore, but is caught by a pack of dogs.
Chapters 17-19 Summary
A man finds Huck in Chapter Seventeen and calls off the
dogs. Huck introduces himself as George Jackson. The man brings
"George" home, where he is eyed cautiously as a possible member of
the Sheperdson family. But they decide he is not. The lady of the house has
Buck, a boy about Huck's age (thirteen or fourteen) get Huck some dry clothes.
Buck says he would have killed a Shepardson if there had been any. Buck tells
Huck a riddle, though Huck does not understand the concept of riddles. Buck
says Huck must stay with him and they will have great fun. Huck invents an
elaborate story of how he was orphaned. The family, the Grangerfords, offer to
let him stay with them for as long as he likes. Huck innocently admires the
house and its (humorously tacky) finery. He similarly admires the work of a
deceased daughter, Emmeline, who created (unintentionally funny) maudlin
pictures and poems about people who died. "Nothing couldn't be
better" than life at the comfortable house.
Huck admires Colonel Grangerford, the master of the
house, and his supposed gentility. He is a warm- hearted man, treated with
great courtesy by everyone. He own a very large estate with over a hundred
slaves. The family's children, besides Buck, are Bob, the oldest, then Tom,
then Charlotte, aged twenty-five, and Sophia, twenty, all of them beautiful.
Three sons have been killed. One day, Buck tries to shoot Harney Shepardson,
but misses. Huck asks why he wanted to kill him. Buck explains the Grangerfords
are in a feud with a neighboring clan of families, the Shepardsons, who are as
grand as they are. No one can remember how the feud started, or name a purpose
for it, but in the last year two people have been killed, including a
fourteen-year-old Grangerford. Buck declares the Shepardson men all brave. The
two families attend church together, their ri es between their knees as the
minister preaches about brotherly love. After church one day, Sophia has Huck
retrieve a bible from the pews. She is delighted to find inside a note with the
words "two-thirty." Later, Huck's slave valet leads him deep into the
swamp, telling him he wants to show him some water-moccasins. There he finds
Jim! Jim had followed Huck to the shore the night they were wrecked, but did
not dare call out for fear of being caught. In the last few days he has
repaired the raft and bought supplies to replace what was lost. The next day
Huck learns that Sophie has run off with a Shepardson boy. In the woods, Huck
finds Buck and a nineteen-year-old Grangerford in a gun-fight with the
Shepardsons. The two are later killed. Deeply disturbed, Huck heads for Jim and
the raft, and the two shove off downstream. Huck notes, "You feel mighty
free and easy and comfortable on a raft."
Huck and Jim are lazily drifting down the river in
Chapter Nineteen. One day they come upon two men on shore eeing some trouble
and begging to be let onto the raft. Huck takes them a mile downstream to
safety. One man is about seventy, bald, with whiskers, the other, thirty. Both
men's clothes are badly tattered. The men do not know each other but are in
similar predicaments. The younger man had been selling a paste to remove tartar
from teeth that takes much of the enamel off with it. He ran out to avoid the
locals' ire. The other had run a temperance (sobriety) revival meeting, but had
to ee after word got out that he drank. The two men, both professional
scam-artists, decide to team up. The younger man declares himself an
impoverished English duke, and gets Huck and Jim to wait on him and treat him
like royalty. The old man then reveals his true identity as the Dauphin, Louis
XVI's long lost son. Huck and Jim then wait on him as they had the
"duke." Soon Huck realizes the two are liars, but to prevent
"quarrels," does not let on that he knows.
Chapters 20-22 Summary
The Duke and Dauphin ask whether Jim is a runaway, and so
Huckleberry concocts a tale of how he was orphaned, and he and Jim were forced
to travel at night since so many people stopped his boat to ask whether Jim was
a runaway. That night, the two royals take Jim and Huck's beds while they stand
watch against a storm. The next morning, the Duke gets the Dauphin to agree to
put on a performance of Shakespeare in the next town they cross. Everyone in
the town has left for a revival meeting in the woods. The meeting is a lively
afiair of several thousand people singing and shouting.
The Dauphin gets up and declares himself a former pirate,
now reformed by the meeting, who will return to the Indian Ocean as a
missionary. The crowd joyfully takes up a collection, netting the Dauphin
eighty-seven dollars and seventy-five cents, and many kisses from pretty young
women. Meanwhile, the Duke took over the deserted print offce and got nine and
a half dollars selling advertisements in the local newspaper. The Duke also
prints up a handbill offering a reward for Jim, so that they can travel freely
by day and tell whoever asks about Jim that the slave is their captive. The
Duke and Dauphin practice the balcony scene from Romeo and Juliet and the sword
fight from Richard III on the raft in Chapter Twenty-one.
The duke also works on his recitation of Hamlet's
"To be or not to be," soliloquy, which he has butchered, throwing in
lines from other parts of the play, and even Macbeth. But to Huck, the Duke
seems to possess a great talent. They visit a one-horse town in Arkansas where
lazy young men loiter in the streets, arguing over chewing tobacco. The Duke
posts handbills for the performance. Huck witnesses the shooting of a rowdy
drunk by a man, Sherburn, he insulted, in front of the victim's daughter. A
crowd gathers around the dying man and then goes off to lynch Sherburn.
The mob charges through the streets in Chapter
Twenty-two, sending women and children running away crying in its wake. They go
to Sherburn's house, knock down the front fence, but back away as the man meets
them on the roof of his front porch, ri e in hand. After a chilling silence,
Sherburn delivers a haughty speech on human nature, saying the average person,
and everyone in the mob, is a coward. Southern juries don't convict murderers
because they rightly fear being shot in the back, in the dark, by the man's
family. Mobs are the most pitiful of all, since no one in them is brave enough
in his own right to commit the act without the mass behind him. Sherburn
declares no one will lynch him: it is daylight and the Southern way is to wait
until dark and come wearing masks. The mob disperses. Huck then goes to the
circus, a "splendid" show, whose clown manages to come up with fantastic
one-liners in a remarkably short amount of time. A performer, pretending to be
a drunk, forces himself into the ring and tries to ride a horse, apparently
hanging on for dear life. The crowd roars its amusement, except for Huck, who
cannot bear to watch the poor man's danger. Only twelve people came to the
Duke's performance, and they laughed all the way through. So the Duke prints
another handbill, this time advertising a performance of "The King's
Cameleopard [Girafie] or The Royal Nonesuch." Bold letters across the
bottom read, "Women and Children Not Admitted."
Chapters 23-25 Summary
The new performance plays to a capacity audience. The
Dauphin, naked except for body paint and some "wild" accouterments,
has the audience howling with laughter. But the Duke and Dauphin are nearly
attacked when the show is ended after this brief performance. To avoid losing
face, the audience convinces the rest of the town the show is a smash, and a
capacity crowd follows the second night. As the Duke anticipated, the third
night's crowd consists of the two previous audiences coming to get their
revenge. The Duke and Huck make a getaway to the raft before the show starts.
From the three-night run, they took in four-hundred sixty-five dollars. Jim is
shocked that the royals are such "rapscallions." Huck explains that
history shows nobles to be rapscallions who constantly lie, steal, and
decapitate{describing in the process how Henry VIII started the Boston Tea
Party and wrote the Declaration of Independence. Huck doesn't see the point in
telling Jim the two are fakes; besides, they really do seem like the real
thing. Jim spends his night watches "moaning and mourning" for his
wife and two children, Johnny and Lizabeth. Though "It don't seem
natural," Huck concludes that Jim loves his family as much as whites love
theirs. Jim is torn apart when he hears a thud in the distance, because it
reminds him of the time he beat his Lizabeth for not doing what he said, not
realizing she had been made deaf-mute by her bout with scarlet fever.
In Chapter Twenty-four, Jim complains about having to
wait, frightened, in the boat, tied up (to avoid suspicion) while the others
are gone. So the Duke dresses Jim in a calico stage robe and blue face paint,
and posts a sign, "Sick Arab{but harmless when not out of his head."
Ashore and dressed up in their newly bought clothes, the Dauphin decides to
make a big entrance by steamboat into the next town. The Dauphin calls Huck
"Adolphus," and encounters a talkative young man who tells him about
the recently deceased Peter Wilks. Wilks sent for his two brothers from
Shefield, England: Harvey, whom he had not seen since he was five, and William,
who is deaf-mute. He has left all his property to his brothers, though it seems
uncertain whether they will ever arrive. The Dauphin gets the young traveler,
who is en route to Rio de Janeiro, to tell him everything about the Wilks. In
Wilks' town, they ask after Peter Wilks, pretending anguish when told of his
death. The Dauphin even makes strange hand signs to the Duke. "It was
enough to make a body ashamed of the human race," Huck thinks.
A crowd gathers before Wilks' house in Chapter
Twenty-five, as the Duke and Dauphin share a tearful meeting with the three
Wilks daughters. The entire town then joins in the "blubbering."
"I never see anything so disgusting," Huck thinks. Wilks' letter
(which he left instead of a will) leaves the house and three thousand dollars
to his daughters, and to his brothers, three thousand dollars, plus a tan-yard
and seven thousand dollars in real estate. The Duke and Dauphin privately count
the money, adding four-hundred fifteen dollars of their own money when the
stash comes up short of the letter's six-thousand, for appearances. They then
give it all to the Wilks women in a great show before a crowd of townspeople.
Doctor Abner Shackleford, an old friend of the deceased, interrupts to declare
them frauds, their accents ridiculously phony. He asks Mary Jane, the oldest
Wilks sister, to listen to him as a friend and turn the impostors out. In
reply, she hands the Dauphin the six thousand dollars to invest however he sees
fit.
Chapters 26-28 Summary
Huck has supper with Joanna, a Wilks sister he refers to
as "the Harelip" ("Cleft lip," a birth defect she possesses).
She cross-examines Huckleberry on his knowledge of England. He makes several
slips, forgetting he is supposedly from Shefield, and that the Dauphin is
supposed to be a Protestant minister.
Finally she asks whether he hasn't made the entire thing
up. Mary Jane and Susan interrupt and instruct Joanna to be courteous to their
guest. She graciously apologizes. Huck feels awful about letting such sweet
women be swindled. He resolves to get them their money. He goes to the Duke and
Dauphin's room to search for the money, but hides when they enter. The Duke
wants to leave that very night, but the Dauphin convinces him to stay until they
have stolen all the family's property. After they leave, Huckleberry takes the
gold to his sleeping cubby, and then sneaks out late at night.
Huck hides the sack of money in Wilks' coffn in Chapter
Twenty-seven, as Mary Jane, crying, enters the front room. Huck doesn't get
another opportunity to safely remove the money, and feels dejected that the
Duke and Dauphin will likely get it back. The funeral the next day is briefly
interrupted by the racket the dog is making down cellar. The undertaker slips out,
and after a "whack" is heard from downstairs, the undertaker returns,
whispering loudly to the preacher, "He had a rat!" Huck remarks how
the rightfully popular undertaker satisfied the people's natural curiosity.
Huck observes with horror as the undertaker seals the
coffn without looking inside. Now he will never know whether the money was
stolen from the coffn, or if he should write Mary Jane to dig up the coffn for
it.
Saying he will take the Wilks' family to England, the
Dauphin sells off the estate and the slaves. He sends a mother to New Orleans
and her two sons to Memphis. The scene at the grief-stricken family's
separation is heart-rending. But Huck comforts himself that they will be
reunited in a week or so when the Duke and Dauphin are exposed. When questioned
by the Duke and Dauphin, Huck blames the loss of the six thousand dollars on
the slaves they just sold, making the two regret the deed.
Huck finds Mary Jane crying in her bedroom in Chapter
Twenty-eight. All joy regarding the trip to England has been destroyed by the
thought of the slave mother and children never seeing each other again.
Touched, Huck unthinkingly blurts out that the family will be reunited in less
than two weeks. Mary Jane, overjoyed, asks Huck to explain. Huck is uneasy,
having little experience telling the truth while in a predicament. He tells
Mary Jane the truth, but asks her to wait at a relative's house until eleven
that night to give him time to get away, since the fate of another person hangs
in the balance. He tells her about the Royal Nonesuch incident, saying that
town will provide witnesses against the frauds. He instructs her to leave
without seeing her "uncles," since her innocent face would give away
their secret. He leaves her a note with the location of the money. She promises
to remember him forever, and pray for him. Though Huck will never see her
again, he will think of her often. Huck meets Susan and Joanna, and says Mary
Jane has gone to see a sick relative. Joanna cross-examines him about this, but
he manages to trick them into staying quiet about the whole thing{almost as
well as Tom Sawyer would have. But later, the auction is interrupted by a mob{
bringing the real Harvey and William Wilks!
Chapters 29-31 Summary
The real Harvey, in an authentic English accent, explains
the delay: their luggage has been misdirected, and his brother's arm has been
broken, making him unable to sign. The doctor again declares The Duke and
Dauphin frauds, and has the crowd bring both real and fraudulent Wilks brothers
to a tavern for examination. The frauds draw suspicion when they are unable to
produce the six thousand dollars. A lawyer friend of the deceased has the Duke,
Dauphin, and the real Harvey sign a piece of paper, then compares the writing
samples to letters he has from the real Harvey.
The frauds are disproved, but the Dauphin doesn't give
up. So the real Harvey declares he knows of a tattoo on his brother's chest,
asking the undertaker who dressed the body to back him up. But after the
Dauphin and Harvey say what they think the tattoo is, the undertaker declares
there wasn't one at all. The mob cries out for the blood of all four men, but
the lawyer instead sends them out to exhume the body and check for the tattoo
themselves. The mob carries the four and Huckleberry with them. The mob is
shocked to discover the gold in the coffn. In the excitement, Huck escapes.
Passing the Wilks's house, he notices a light in the upstairs window.
Huck steals a canoe and makes his way to the raft, and,
exhausted, shoves off. Huck dances for joy on the raft, but his heart sinks as
the Duke and Dauphin approach in a boat.
The Dauphin nearly strangles Huck in Chapter Thirty, out
of anger at his desertion. But the Duke stops him. They explain that they
escaped after the gold was found. The thieves start arguing about which one of
the two hid the gold in the coffn, to come back for later. But they make up and
go to sleep.
They take the raft downstream without stopping for
several days. The Duke and Dauphin try several scams on various towns, without
success. The two start to have secret discussions, worrying Jim and Huck, who
resolve to ditch them at the first opportunity. Finally, the Duke, Dauphin, and
Huck go ashore in one town to feel it out. The Duke and Dauphin get into a
fight in a tavern, and Huck takes the chance to escape. But back at the raft,
there is no sign of Jim. A boy explains that a man recognized Jim as a runaway
from a handbill they had found, offering two hundred dollars for him in New
Orleans{the handbill the Duke had printed earlier. But he said he had to leave
suddenly, and so sold his interest for forty dollars. Huck is disgusted by the
Dauphin's trick. He would like to write to Miss Watson to fetch Jim, so he
could at least be home and not in New Orleans. But he realizes she would simply
sell him downstream anyway, and he would get in trouble as well. The
predicament is surely God's punishment for his helping Jim. Huck tries to pray
for forgiveness, but cannot.
He writes the letter to Miss Watson giving Jim up. But
thinking of the time he spent with Jim, of his kind heart and their friendship,
Huck trembles. After a minute he decides, "All right then, I'll go to
hell!" He resolves to "steal Jim out of slavery." He goes in his
store-bought clothes to see Phelps, the man who is holding Jim. He finds the
Duke putting up posters for the Royal Nonesuch. Huck concocts a story about how
he wandered the town, but didn't find Jim or the raft. The Duke says he sold
Jim to a man forty miles away, and sends Huck on the three day trip to get him.
Chapters 32-35 Summary
Huck goes back to the Phelps's house in Chapter
Thirty-two. A bunch of hounds threaten him, but a slave woman calls them off.
The white mistress of the house, Sally, comes out, delighted to see the boy she
is certain is her nephew, Tom. Sally asks why he has been delayed the last
several days. He explains that a cylinder- head on the steamboat blew out. She
asks whether anyone got hurt, and he replies no, but it killed a black person.
The woman is relieved that no one was hurt. Huck is nervous about not having
any information on his identity, but when Sally's husband, Silas, returns, he
shouts out for joy that Tom Sawyer has finally arrived! Hearing a steamboat go
up the river, Huck heads out to the docks, supposedly to get his luggage, but
really to head off Tom should he arrive.
Huck interrupts Tom's wagon coming down the road in
Chapter Thirty-three. Tom is at first startled by the "ghost," but is
eventually convinced that Huck is alive. He even agrees to help Huck free Jim.
Huck is shocked by this: "Tom Sawyer fell, considerable, in my
estimation." Tom follows Huck to the Phelps's a half hour later. The
isolated family is thrilled to have another guest. Tom introduces himself as
William Thompson from Ohio, stopping on his way to visit his uncle nearby. But
Tom slips and kisses his aunt, who is outraged by such familiarity from a
stranger. Taken aback for a few moments, Tom recovers by saying he is another
relative, Sid Sawyer, and this has all been a joke. Later, walking through
town, Huck sees the Duke and Dauphin taken by a mob, tarred and feathered on a
rail. Jim had told on the pair. Tom feels bad for the two, and his ill feelings
toward them melt away. "Human beings can be awful cruel to one
another," Huck observes.
Huck concludes that a conscience is useless, since it
makes you feel bad for everyone. Tom agrees. Huck is impressed by Tom's
intelligence when he skillfully figures out that Jim is being held in a shed.
Huck's plan to free Jim is to steal the key and make off with Jim by night. Tom
belittles this plan for its simplicity and lack of showmanship. Tom's plan is
fifteen times better than Huck's for its style{it might even get all three
killed. Meanwhile, Huck is incredulous that respectable Tom is going to
sacrifice his reputation by helping a slave escape.
Huck and Tom get Jim's keeper, a superstitious slave, to
let them see him. When Jim cries out for joy, Tom tricks Jim's keeper into
thinking the cry a trick some witches had played on him. Tom and Huck promise
to dig Jim out.
Tom is upset in Chapter Thirty-five. Innocent uncle
Phelps has taken so few precautions to guard Jim, they have to invent all the
obstacles to his rescue. Tom says they must saw Jim's chain off instead of just
lifting it off the bedstead, since that's how it's done in all the books.
Similarly, Jim requires a rope ladder, a moat, and a shirt on which to keep a
journal, presumably in his own blood. Sawing his leg off to escape would also
be a nice touch. But since they're pressed for time, they will dig Jim out with
case-knives (large kitchen knives).
Chapters 36-39 Summary
Out late at night, Huck and Tom give up digging with the
case-knives after much fruitless efiort. They use pick-axes instead, but agree
to "let on"{pretend{that they are using case-knives. The next day,
Tom and Huck gather candlesticks, candles, spoons, and a tin plate. Jim can
etch a declaration of his captivity on the tin plate using the other objects,
then throw it out the window to be read by the world, like in the novels. That
night, the two boys dig their way to Jim, who is delighted to see them. He
tells them that Sally and Silas have been to visit and pray with him. He
doesn't understand the boys' scheme but agrees to go along. Tom thinks the
whole thing enormously fun and "intellectural." He tricks Jim's
keeper, Nat, into bringing Jim a "witch pie" to help ward off the
witches that have haunted Nat.
The missing shirt, candles, sheets, and other articles
Huck and Tom stole to give Jim get Aunt Sally mad at everyone but the two boys
in Chapter Thirty-seven. To make up, Huck and Tom secretly plug up the holes of
the rats that have supposedly stolen everything, confounding Uncle Silas when
he goes to do the job. By removing and then replacing sheets and spoons, the
two boys so confuse Sally that she loses track of how many she has. It takes a
great deal of trouble to put the rope ladder (made of sheets) in the witch's
pie, but at last it is finished and they give it to Jim. Tom insists Jim
scratch an inscription on the wall of the shed, with his coat of arms, the way
the books say. Making the pens from the spoons and candlestick is a great deal
of trouble, but they manage. Tom creates an unintentionally humorous coat of
arms and set of mournful declarations for Jim to inscribe on the wall. When Tom
disapproves of writing on a wooden, rather than a stone wall, they go steal a
millstone. Tom then tries to get Jim to take a rattlesnake or rat into the
shack to tame, and to grow a ower to water with his tears. Jim protests against
the ridiculously unnecessary amount of trouble Tom wants to create. Tom replies
that these are opportunities for greatness.
Huck and Tom capture rats and snakes in Chapter
Thirty-nine, accidentally infesting the Phelps house with them. Aunt Sally
becomes wildly upset when the snakes start to fall from the rafters onto her or
her bed. Tom explains that that's just how women are. Jim, meanwhile, hardly
has room to move with all the wildlife in his shed. Uncle Silas decides it is
time to sell Jim, and starts sending out advertisements. So Tom writes letters,
signed an "unknown friend," to the Phelps warning of trouble. The
family is terrified. Tom finishes with a longer letter pretending to be from a
member of a band of desperate gangsters out to steal Jim. The author has found
religion and so is warning them to block the plan.
Chapters 40-43 Summary
Fifteen uneasy local men with guns are in the Phelps's
front room. Huck goes to the shed to warn Tom and Jim. Tom is excited to hear
about the fifteen armed men. A group of men rush into the shed. In the darkness
Tom, Huck, and Jim escape through the hole. Tom makes a noise going over the
fence, attracting the attention of the men, who shoot at them as they run. But
they make it to the hidden raft, and set off downstream, delighted with their
success{especially Tom, who has a bullet in the leg as a souvenir.
Huck and Jim are taken aback by Tom's wound. Jim says
they should get a doctor{what Tom would do if the situation were reversed.
Jim's reaction confirms Huck's belief that Jim is "white inside."
Huck finds a doctor in Chapter Forty-one and sends him to
Tom. The next morning, Huck runs into Silas, who takes him home. The place is
filled with farmers and their wives, all discussing the weird contents of Jim's
shed, and the hole. They conclude a band of (probably black) robbers of amazing
skill must have tricked not only the Phelps and their friends, but the original
band of desperadoes. Sally will not let Huck out to find Tom, since she is so
sad to have lost Tom and does not want to risk another boy. Huckleberry is
touched by her concern and vows never to hurt her again.
Silas has been unable to find Tom in Chapter Forty- two.
They have gotten a letter from Tom's Aunt Polly, Sally's sister. But Sally
casts it aside when she sees Tom, semi-conscious, brought in on a mattress,
accompanied by a crowd including Jim, in chains, and the doctor. Some of the
local men would like to hang Jim, but are unwilling to risk having to
compensate Jim's master. So they treat Jim roughly, and chain him hand and foot
inside the shed. The doctor intervenes, saying Jim isn't bad, since he
sacrificed his freedom to help nurse Tom. Sally, meanwhile, is at Tom's
bedside, glad that his condition has improved. Tom wakes and gleefully details
how they set Jim free. He is horrified to learn that Jim is now in chains. He
explains that Jim was freed in Miss Watson's will when she died two months ago.
She regretted ever having considered selling Jim down the
river. Just then, Aunt Polly walks into the room. She came after Sally
mysteriously wrote her that Sid Sawyer was staying with her. After a tearful
reunion with Sally, she identifies Tom and Huckleberry, yelling at both boys
for their misadventures. When Huckleberry asks Tom in the last chapter what he
planned to do once he had freed the already- freed Jim, Tom replies that he was
going to repay Jim for his troubles and send him back a hero. When Aunt Polly
and the Phelps hear how Jim helped the doctor, they treat him much better.
Tom gives Jim forty dollars for his troubles. Jim
declares that the omen of his hairy chest has come true. Tom makes a full
recovery, and has the bullet inserted into a watch he wears around his neck. He
and Huck would like to go on another adventure, to Indian Territory
(present-day Oklahoma). But Huck worries Pap has taken all his money. Jim tells
him that couldn't have happened: the dead body they found way back on the
houseboat, that Jim would not let Huck see, belonged to Pap. Huck has nothing
more to write about. He is "rotten glad," since writing a book turned
out to be quite a task. He does not plan any future writings. Instead, he hopes
to make the trip out to Indian Territory, since Aunt Sally is already trying to
"sivilize" him, and he's had enough of that.
Robert Penn Warren was one of the twentieth century's outstanding
men of letters. He found great success as a novelist, a poet, a critic, and a
scholar, and enjoyed a career showered with acclaim. He won two Pulitzer
Prizes, was Poet Laureate of the United States, and was presented with a
Congressional Medal of Fr edom. He founded the Southern Review and was an
important contributor to the New Criticism of 1930s and '40s.
Born in 1905, Warren showed his
exceptional intelligence from an early age; he attended college at Vanderbilt
University, where he befriended some of the most important contemporary figures
in Southern literature, including Allan Tate and John Crowe Ransom, and where
he won a Rhodes Scholarship to study at Oxford University in England. During a
stay in Italy, Warren wrote a verse drama called Proud Flesh,which dealt with
themes of political power and moral corruption. As a professor at Louisiana
State University, Warren had observed the rise of Louisiana political boss Huey
Long, who embodied, in many ways, the ideas Warren tried to work into Proud
Flesh. Unsatisfied with the result, Warren began to rework his elaborate drama
into a novel, set in the contemporary South, and based in part on the person of
Huey Long.
The result was All the King'sMen,
Warren's best and most acclaimed book. First published in 1946, Allthe King's
Men is one of the best literary documents dealing with the American South
during the Great Depression. The novel won the Pulitzer Prize, and was adapted
into a movie that won an Academy Award in 1949.
All the King's Men focuses on the
lives of Willie Stark, an upstart farm boy who rises through sheer force of
will to become Governor of an unnamed Southern state during the 1930s, and Jack
Burden, the novel's narrator, a cynical scion of the state's political
aristocracy who uses his abilities as a historical researcher to help Willie
blackmail and control his enemies.
The novel deals with the large
question of the responsibility individuals bear for their actions within the turmoil
of history, and it is perhaps appropriate that the impetus of the novel's story
comes partly from real historical occurrences.
Jack Burden is entirely a creation of
Robert Penn Warren, but there are a number of important parallels between
Willie Stark and Huey Long, who served Louisiana as both Governor and Senator
from 1928 until his death in 1935.
Like Huey Long, Willie Stark is an
uneducated farm boy who passed the state bar exam; like Huey Long, he rises to
political power in his state by instituting liberal reform designed to help the
state's poor farmers. And like Huey Long, Willie is assassinated at the peak of
his power by a doctor Dr. Adam Stanton in Willie's case, Dr. Carl A. Weiss in
Long's. (Unlike Willie, however, Long was assassinated after becoming a
Senator, and was in fact in the middle of challenging Franklin D. Roosevelt for
the Presidential nomination of the Democratic Party.)
Characters
Jack Burden -- Willie Stark's
political right-hand man, the narrator of the novel and in many ways its protagonist.
Jack comes from a prominent family (the town he grew up in, Burden's Landing,
was named for his ancestors), and knows many of the most important people in
the state.
Despite his aristocratic background,
Jack allies himself with the liberal, amoral Governor Stark, to the displeasure
of his family and friends. He uses his considerable skills as a researcher to
uncover the secrets of Willie's political enemies. Jack was once married to
Lois Seager, but has left her by the time of the novel. Jack's main
characteristics are his intelligence and his curious lack of ambition; he seems
to have no agency of his own, and for the most part he is content to take his
direction from Willie. Jack is also continually troubled by the question of motive
and responsibility in history: he quit working on his PhD thesis in history
when he decided he could not comprehend Cass Mastern's motives. He develops the
Great Twitch theory to convince himself that no one can be held responsible for
anything that happens. During the course of the novel, however, Jack rejects
the Great Twitch theory and accepts the idea of responsibility.
Willie Stark -- Jack Burden's boss, who
rises from poverty to become the governor of his state and its most powerful
political figure. Willie takes control of the state through a combination of
political reform (he institutes sweeping liberal measures designed to tax the
rich and ease the burden on the state's many poor farmers) and underhanded
guile (he blackmails and bullies his enemies into submission). While Jack is
intelligent and inactive, Willie is essentially all motive power and direction.
The extent of his moral philosophy is his belief that everyone and everything
is bad, and that moral action involves making goodness out of the badness.
Willie is married to Lucy Stark, with
whom he has a son, Tom. But his voracious sexual appetite leads him into a
number of afiairs, including one with Sadie Burke and one with Anne Stanton.
Willie is murdered by Adam Stanton toward the end of the novel.
Anne Stanton -- Jack Burden's first
love, Adam Stanton's sister, and, for a time, Willie Stark's mistress. The
daughter of Governor Stanton, Anne is raised to believe in a strict moral code,
a belief which is threatened and nearly shattered when Jack shows her proof of
her father's wrongdoing.
Adam Stanton -- A brilliant surgeon and
Jack Burden's closest childhood friend. Anne Stanton's brother. Jack persuades
Adam to put aside his moral reservations about Willie and become director of
the new hospital Willie is building, and Adam later cares for Tom Stark after
his injury. But two revelations combine to shatter Adam's worldview: he learns
that his father illegally protected Judge Irwin after he took a bribe, and he
learns that his sister has become Willie Stark's lover. Driven mad with the
knowledge, Adam assassinates Willie in the lobby of the Capitol towards the end
of the novel.
Judge Montague Irwin -- A prominent citizen of
Burden's Landing and a former state Attorney General; also a friend to the
Scholarly Attorney and a father figure to Jack. When Judge Irwin supports one
of Willie's political enemies in a Senate election, Willie orders Jack to dig
up some information on the judge. Jack discovers that his old friend accepted a
bribe from the American Electric Power Company in 1913 to save his plantation.
(In return for the money, the judge dismissed a case against the Southern Belle
Fuel Company, a sister corporation to American Electric.) When he confronts the
judge with this information, the judge commits suicide; when Jack learns of the
suicide from his mother, he also learns that Judge Irwin was his real father.
Sadie Burke -- Willie Stark's
secretary, and also his mistress. Sadie has been with Willie from the beginning,
and believes that she made him what he is. Despite the fact that he is a
married man, she becomes extremely jealous of his relationships with other
women, and they often have long, passionate fights. Sadie is tough, cynical,
and extremely vulnerable; when Willie announces that he is leaving her to go
back to Lucy, she tells Tiny Dufiy in a fit of rage that Willie is sleeping
with Anne Stanton. Tiny tells Adam Stanton, who assassinates Willie. Believing
herself to be responsible for Willie's death, Sadie checks into a sanitarium.
.
Tiny Dufiy -- Lieutenant-Governor of the state
when Willie is assassinated. Fat, obsequious, and untrustworthy, Tiny swallows
Willie's abuse and con- tempt for years, but finally tells Adam Stanton that
Willie is sleeping with Anne. When Adam murders Willie, Tiny becomes Governor.
Sugar-Boy O'Sheean -- Willie Stark's driver, and also his bodyguard--
Sugar-Boy
is a crack shot with a .38 special and a brilliant driver. A stuttering
Irishman, Sugar-Boy follows Willie blindly.
Lucy Stark -- Willie's long-sufiering wife, who
is constantly disappointed by her husband's failure to live up to her moral
standards. Lucy eventually leaves Willie to live at her sister's poultry farm.
They are in the process of reconciling when Willie is murdered.
Tom Stark -- Willie's arrogant, hedonistic son,
a football star for the state university. Tom lives a life of drunkenness and
promiscuity before he breaks his neck in a football accident. Permanently
paralyzed, he dies of pneumonia shortly thereafter. Tom is accused of
impregnating Sibyl Frey, whose child is adopted by Lucy at the end of the
novel.
Jack's mother -- A beautiful,
"famished-cheeked" woman from Arkansas, Jack's mother is brought back
to Burden's Landing by the Scholarly Attorney, but falls in love with Judge
Irwin and begins an afiair with him; Jack is a product of that afiair. After
the Scholarly Attorney leaves her, she marries a succession of men (the Tycoon,
the Count, the Young Executive). Jack's realization that she is capable of love--and
that she really loved Judge Irwin-- helps him put aside his cynicism at the end
of the novel.
Sam MacMurfee -- Willie's main political
enemy within the state's Democratic Party, and governor before Willie. After
Willie crushes him in the gubernatorial election, MacMurfee continues to
control the Fourth District, from which he plots ways to claw his way back into
power.
Ellis Burden -- The man whom Jack
believes to be his father for most of the book, before learning his real father
is Judge Irwin. After discovering his wife's afiair with the judge, the
"Scholarly Attorney" (as Jack characterizes him) leaves her. He moves
to the state capital where he attempts to conduct a Christian ministry for the
poor and the unfortunate.
Theodore Murrell -- The "Young
Executive," as Jack characterizes him; Jack's mother's husband for most of
the novel.
Governor Joel Stanton -- Adam and Anne's father,
governor of the state when Judge Irwin was Attorney General. Protects the judge
after he takes the bribe to save his plantation.
Hugh Miller -- Willie Stark's Attorney
General, an honorable man who resigns following the Byram White scandal.
Joe Harrison -- Governor of the state
who sets Willie up as a dummy candidate to split the MacMurfee vote, and
thereby enables Willie's entrance onto the political stage. When Willie learns
how Harrison has treated him, he withdraws from the race and campaigns for
MacMurfee, who wins the election. By the time Willie crushes MacMurfee in the
next election, Harrison's days of political clout are over.
Mortimer L. Littlepaugh -- The man who preceded
Judge Irwin as counsel for the American Electric Power Company in the early
1900s. When Judge Irwin took Littlepaugh's job as part of the bribe,
Littlepaugh confronted Governor Stanton about the judge's illegal activity.
When the governor protected the judge, Littlepaugh committed suicide.
Miss Lily Mae Littlepaugh -- Mortimer Littlepaugh's
sister, an old spiritual medium who sells her brother's suicide note to Jack,
giving him the proof he needs about Judge Irwin and the bribe.
Gummy Larson -- MacMurfee's most
powerful supporter, a wealthy businessman. Willie is forced to give Larson the
building contract to the hospital so that Larson will call MacMurfee off about
the Sibyl Frey controversy, and thereby preserve Willie's chance to go to the
Senate.
Lois Seager -- Jack's sexy first wife,
whom he leaves when he begins to
perceive
her as a person rather than simply as a machine for gratifying his
desires.
Byram B. White -- The State Auditor during
Willie's first term as governor. His acceptance of graft money propels a
scandal that eventually leads to an impeachment attempt against Willie. Willie
protects White and blackmails his enemies into submission, a decision which
leads to his estrangement from Lucy and the resignation of Hugh Miller.
Hubert Coffee -- A slimy MacMurfee
employee who tries to bribe Adam Stanton into giving the hospital contract to
Gummy Larson.
Sibyl Frey -- A young girl who accuses Tom Stark
of having gotten her pregnant; Tom alleges that Sibyl has slept with so many
men, she could not possibly know he was the father of her child. Marvin Frey --
Sibyl Frey's father, who threatens Willie with a paternity suit. (He is being
used by MacMurfee.)
Cass Mastern -- The brother of Jack's
grandmother. During the middle of the nineteenth century, Cass had an afiair
with Annabelle Trice, the wife of his friend Duncan. After Duncan's suicide,
Annabelle sold a slave, Phebe; Cass tried to track down Phebe, but failed. He
became an abolitionist, but fought in the Confederate Army during the Civil
War, during which he was killed. Jack tries to use his papers as the basis of
his Ph.D. dissertation, but walked away from the project when he was unable to
understand Cass Mastern's motivations.
Gilbert Mastern -- Cass Mastern's wealthy
brother.
Annabelle Trice -- Cass Mastern's lover,
the wife of Duncan Trice. When the slave Phebe brings her Duncan's wedding ring
following his suicide, Annabelle says that she cannot bear the way Phebe looked
at her, and sells her.
Duncan Trice -- Cass Mastern's
hedonistic friend in Lexington, Annabelle Trice's husband. When he learns that
Cass has had an afiair with Annabelle, Duncan takes off his wedding ring and
shoots himself.
Phebe -- The slave who brings
Annabelle Trice her husband's wedding ring following his suicide. As a result,
Annabelle sells her.
All the King's Men is also the story
of Jack Burden, the scion of one of the state's aristocratic dynasties, who
turns his back on his genteel upbringing and becomes Willie Stark's right-hand
man. Jack uses his considerable talents as a historical researcher to dig up
the unpleasant secrets of Willie's enemies, which are then used for purposes of
blackmail. Cynical and lacking in ambition, Jack has walked away from many of
his past interests--he left his dissertation in American History unfinished,
and never managed to marry his first love, Anne Stanton, the daughter of a
former governor of the state.
When Willie asks Jack to look for
skeletons in the closet of Judge Irwin, a father figure from Jack's childhood,
Jack is forced to confront his ideas concerning consequence, responsibility,
and motivation. He discovers that Judge Irwin accepted a bribe, and that
Governor Stanton covered it up; the resulting blackmail attempt leads to Judge
Irwin's suicide. It also leads to Adam Stanton's decision to accept the
position of director of the new hospital Willie is building, and leads Anne to
begin an afiair with Willie.
When Adam learns of the afiair, he
murders Willie in a rage, and Jack leaves politics forever. Willie's death and
the circumstances in which it occurs force Jack to rethink his desperate belief
that no individual can ever be responsible for the consequences of any action
within the chaos and tumult of history and time. Jack marries Anne Stanton and
begins working on a book about Cass Mastern, the man whose papers he had once
tried to use as the source for his failed dissertation in American History.
Chapter 1
Summary
Jack
Burden describes driving down Highway 58 with his boss, Governor Willie Stark,
in the Boss's big black Cadillac--Sugar-Boy is driving, and in the car with
them were the Boss's wife Lucy, son Tommy, and the Lieutenant Governor, Tiny
Dufiy. Sugar-Boy drives them into Mason City, where Willie is going to pose for
a press photo with his father, who lives on a nearby farm. The Cadillac is
followed by a car full of press men and photographers, overseen by Willie's
secretary, Sadie Burke. It is summer, 1936, and scorching hot outside.
In Mason City, Willie immediately
attracts an adoring throng of people. The group goes inside the drugstore,
where Doc pours them glasses of Coke. The crowd pressures Willie for a speech,
but he declines, saying he's just come to see his "pappy". He then
delivers an efiective impromptu speech on the theme of not delivering a speech,
saying he doesn't have to stump for votes on his day off. The crowd applauds,
and the group drives out to the Stark farm.
On the way, Jack remembers his first
meeting with Willie, in 1922, when Jack was a reporter for the Chronicle and
Willie was only the County Treasurer of Mason County. Jack had gone to the back
room of Slade's pool hall to get some information from deputy-sherifi Alex
Michel and Tiny Dufiy (then the Tax Assessor, and an ally of then-Governor
Harrison). While he was there, Dufiy tried to bully Willie into drinking a
beer, which Willie claimed not to want, instead ordering an orange soda. Dufiy
ordered Slade to bring Willie a beer, and Slade said that he only served
alcohol to men who wanted to drink it. He brought Willie the orange soda. When
Prohibition was repealed after Willie's rise to power, Slade was one of the
first men to get a liquor license; he got a lease at an exceptional location,
and was now a rich man.
At the farm, Willie and Lucy pose for
a picture with spindly Old Man Stark and his dog. Then the photographers have
Willie pose for a picture in his old bedroom, which still contains all his
schoolbooks. Toward sunset, Sugar-Boy is out shooting cans with his .38
special, and Jack goes outside for a drink from his ask and a look at the sunset.
As he leans against the fence, Willie approaches him and asks for a drink. Then
Sadie Burke runs up to them with a piece of news, which she reveals only after
Willie stops teasing her: Judge Irwin has just endorsed Callahan, a Senate
candidate running against Willie's man, Masters.
After
dinner at the Stark farm, Willie announces that he, Jack, and Sugar-Boy will be
going for a drive. He orders Sugar-Boy to drive the Cadillac to Burden's
Landing, more than a hundred miles away. Jack grew up in Burden's Landing,
which was named for his ancestors, and he complains about the long drive this
late at night. As they approach Jack's old house, he thinks about his mother
lying inside with Theodore Murrell--not Jack's first stepfather. And he thinks
about Anne and Adam Stanton, who lived nearby and used to play with him as a
child. He also thinks about Judge Irwin, who lives near the Stanton and Burden
places, and who was a father figure to Jack after his own father left. Jack
tells Willie that Judge Irwin won't scare easily, and inwardly hopes that what
he says is true.
The
three men arrive at Judge Irwin's, where Willie speaks insouciantly and
insolently to the gentlemanly old judge. Judge Irwin insults Jack for being
employed by such a man, and tells Willie that he endorsed Callahan because of
some damning information he had been given about Masters. Willie says that it
would be possible to find dirt on anyone, and advises the judge to retract his
endorsement, lest some dirt should turn up on him. He heavily implies that
Judge Irwin would lose his position as a judge. Judge Irwin angrily throws the
men out of his house, and on the drive back to Mason City, Willie orders Jack
to find some dirt on the judge, and to "make it stick."
Writing
in 1939, three years after that scene, Jack re ects that Masters--who did get
elected to the Senate--is now dead, and Adam Stanton is dead, and Judge Irwin
is dead, and Willie himself is dead: Willie, who told Jack to find some dirt on
Judge Irwin and make it stick. And Jack remembers: "Little Jackie made it
stick, all right."
Chapter
2 Summary
Jack
Burden remembers the years during which Willie Stark rose to power. While
Willie was Mason County Treasurer, he became embroiled in a controversy over
the building contract for the new school. The head of the city council awarded
the contract to the business partner of one of his relatives, no doubt
receiving a healthy kickback for doing so. The political machine attempted to
run this contract over Willie, but Willie insisted that the contract be awarded
to the lowest bidder. The local big-shots responded by spreading the story that
the lowest bidder would import black labor to construct the building, and,
Mason County being redneck country, the people sided against Willie, who was trounced
in the next election. Jack Burden covered all this in the Chronicle, which
sided with Willie.
After
he was beaten out of offce, Willie worked on his father's farm, hit the law
books at night, and eventually passed the state bar exam. He set up his own law
practice. Then one day during a fire drill at the new school, a fire escape
collapsed due to faulty construction and three students died. At the funeral,
one of the bereaved fathers stood by Willie and cried aloud that he had been
punished for voting against an honest man. After that, Willie was a local hero.
During the next gubernatorial election, in which Harrison ran against
MacMurfee, the vote was pretty evenly divided between city-dwellers, who
supported Harrison, and country folk, who supported MacMurfee. The Harrison
camp decided to split the MacMurfee vote by secretly setting up another
candidate who could draw some of MacMurfee's support in the country. They
settled on Willie. One day Harrison's man, Tiny Dufiy, visited Willie in Mason
City and convinced him that he was God's choice to run for governor.
Willie
wanted the offce desperately, and so he believed him.Willie stumped the state,
and Jack Burden covered his campaign for the Chronicle. Willie was a terrible
candidate. His speeches were full of facts and figures; he never stirred the
emotions of the crowd. Eventually Sadie Burke, who was with the Harrison camp
and followed Willie's campaign, revealed to Willie that he had been set up.
Enraged, Willie gulped down a whole bottle of whiskey and passed out in Jack
Burden's room. The next day, he struggled to make it to his campaign barbecue
in the city of Upton. To help Willie overcome his hangover, Jack had to fill
him full of whiskey again. At the barbecue, the furious, drunken Willie gave the
crowd a fire-and-brimstone speech in which he declared that he had been set up,
that he was just a hick like everyone else in the crowd, and that he was
withdrawing from the race to support MacMurfee. But if MacMurfee didn't deliver
for the little people, Willie admonished the hearers to nail him to the door.
Willie said that if they passed him the hammer he'd nail him to the door
himself. Tiny Dufiy tried to stop the speech, but fell off the stage.
Willie
stumped for MacMurfee, who won the election. Afterwards, Willie returned to his
law practice, at which he made a great deal of money and won some high- proffle
cases. Jack didn't see Willie again until the next election, when the political
battlefield had changed: Willie now owned the Democratic Party. Jack quit his
job at the Chronicle because the paper was forcing him to support MacMurfee in
his column, and slumped into a depression. He spent all his time sleeping and
piddling around--he called the period "the Great Sleep," and said it
had happened twice before, once just before he walked away from his doctoral
dissertation in American History, and once after Lois divorced him. During the
Great Sleep Jack occasionally visited Adam Stanton, took Anne Stanton to dinner
a few times, and visited his father, who now spent all his time handing out
religious iers. At some point during this time Willie was elected governor.
One
morning Jack received a phone call from Sadie Burke, saying that the Boss
wanted to see him the next morning at ten. Jack asked who the Boss was, and she
replied, "Willie Stark, Governor Stark, or don't you read the papers?"
Jack went to see Willie, who offered him a job for $3,600 a year. Jack asked
Willie who he would be working for--Willie or the state.
Willie
said he would be working for him, not the state. Jack wondered how Willie could
afiord to pay him $3,600 a year when the governorship only paid $5,000. But
then he remembered the money Willie had made as a lawyer. He accepted the job,
and the next night he went to have dinner at the Governor's mansion.
Chapter
3 Summary
Jack
Burden tells about going home to Burden's Landing to visit his mother, some
time in 1933. His mother disapproves of his working for Willie, and Theodore
Murrell (his mother's husband, whom Jack thinks of as "the Young
Executive") irritates him with his questions about politics. Jack
remembers being happy in the family's mansion until he was six years old, when
his father ("the Scholarly Attorney") left home to distribute
religious pamphlets, and Jack's mother told him he had gone because he didn't
love her anymore. She then married a succession of men: the Tycoon, the Count,
and finally the Young Executive. Jack remembers picnicking with Adam and Anne
Stanton, and swimming with Anne. He remembers arguing with his mother in 1915
over his decision to go to the State University instead of to Harvard.
That
night in 1933, Jack, his mother, and the Young Executive go to Judge Irwin's
for a dinner party; the assembled aristocrats talk politics, and are staunchly
opposed to Willie Stark's liberal reforms. Jack is forced to entertain the
pretty young Miss Dumonde, who irritates him. When he drives back to Willie's
hotel, he kisses Sadie Burke on the forehead, simply because she isn't named
Dumonde. On the drive back, Jack thinks about his parents in their youth, when
his father brought his mother to Burden's Landing from her home in Arkansas. In
Willie's room, hell is breaking loose: MacMurfee's men in the Legislature are
mounting an impeachment attempt on Byram B. White, the state auditor, who has
been involved in a graft scandal. Willie humiliates and insults White, but
decides to protect him. This decision causes Hugh Miller, Willie's Attorney
General, to resign from offce, and nearly provokes Lucy into leaving Willie. Willie
orders Jack to dig up dirt on MacMurfee's men in the Legislature, and he begins
frenetically stumping the state, giving speeches during the day and
intimidating and blackmailing MacMurfee's men at night. Stunned by his
aggressive activity, MacMurfee's men attempt to seize the offensive by
impeaching Willie himself. But the blackmailing efiorts work, and the
impeachment is called off before the vote can be taken. Still, the day of the
impeachment, a huge crowd descends on the capital in support of Willie. Willie
tells Jack that after the impeachment he is going to build a massive,
state-of-the-art hospital; Willie wins his next election by a landslide.
During
all this time, Jack re ects on Willie's sexual conquests--he has begun a
long-term afiair with Sadie Burke, who is fiercely jealous of his other
mistresses, but Lucy seems to know nothing about it. Lucy does eventually leave
Willie, spending time in St. Augustine and then at her sister's poultry farm,
but they keep up the appearance of marriage. Jack speculates that Lucy does not
sever all her ties with Willie for Tommy's sake, though teen-aged Tommy has
become an arrogant football star with a string of sexual exploits of his own.
Chapter
4 Summary
Returning
to the night in 1936 when he, Willie, and Sugar-Boy drove away from Judge
Irwin's house, Jack re ects that his inquiry into Judge Irwin's past was really
his second major historical study. He recalls his first, as a graduate student
at the State University, studying for his Ph.D. in American History. Jack lived
in a slovenly apartment with a pair of slovenly roommates, and blew all the
money his mother sent him on drinking binges. He was writing his dissertation
on the papers of Cass Mastern, his father's uncle.
As
a student at Translyvania College in the 1850s, Cass Mastern had had an afiair
with Annabelle Trice, the wife of his friend Duncan Trice. When Duncan
discovered the afiair, he took off his wedding ring and shot himself, a suicide
that was chalked up to accident. But Phebe, one of the Trices' slaves, had
found the ring, and taken it to Annabelle Trice. Annabelle had been unable to
bear the knowledge that Phebe knew about her sin, and so she sold her. Appalled
to learn that Annabelle had sold Phebe instead of setting her free--and
appalled to learn that she had separated the slave from her husband--Cass set
out to find and free Phebe; but he failed, wounded in a fight with a man who
insinuated that he had sexual designs on Phebe.
After
that, he set to farming a plantation he had obtained with the help of his
wealthy brother Gilbert. But he freed his slaves and became a devout
abolitionist. Even so, when the war started, he enlisted as a private in the
Confederate Army. Complicating matters further, though a Confederate soldier he
vowed not to kill a single enemy soldier, since he believed himself already
responsible for the death of his friend. He was killed in a battle outside
Atlanta in 1864. After leaving to find Phebe, he had never set eyes on
Annabelle Trice again.
One
day Jack simply gave up working on his dissertation. He could not understand
why Cass Mastern acted the way he did, and he walked away from the apartment
without even boxing up the papers. A landlady sent them to him, but they
remained unopened as he endured a long stretch of the Great Sleep. The papers
remained in their unopened box throughout the time he spent with his beautiful
wife Lois; after he left her, they remained unopened. The brown paper parcel
yellowed, and the name "Jack Burden,"written on top, slowly faded.
Chapter
5 Summary
In
1936, Jack mulls over the problem of finding dirt on Judge Irwin. He thinks the
judge would have been motivated by ambition, love, fear, or money, and settles
on money as the most likely reason he might have been driven over the line. He
goes to visit his father, but the Scholarly Attorney is preoccupied taking care
of an "unfortunate" named George, and refuses to answer his
"foul" questions. He visits Anne and Adam Stanton at their father's
musty old mansion, and learns from Adam that the judge was once broke, back in
1913. But Anne tells him that the judge got out of his financial problems by
marrying a rich woman.
At
some time during this period, Jack goes to one of Tommy's football games with
Willie. Tommy wins the game, and Willie says that he will be an All- American.
Tommy receives the adulation of Willie and all his cohorts, and lives an
arrogant life full of women and alcohol. Also during this time, Jack learns
from Tiny Dufiy that Willie is spending six million dollars on the new hospital.
Soon after, Anne tells Jack that she herself had lunch with Willie, in a
successful attempt to get state funding for one of her charities.
Jack
decides to investigate the judge's financial past further. Delving into court
documents and old newspapers, he discovers that the judge had not married into
money, but had taken out a mortgage on his plantation, which he was nearly
unable to pay. A sudden windfall enabled him to stop foreclosure proceedings
toward the end of his term as Attorney General under Governor Stanton. Also,
after his term he had been given a lucrative job at American Electric Power
Company. After some further digging, Jack extracts a letter from a strange old
spiritual medium named Lily Mae Littlepaugh, from her brother George Littlepaugh,
whom Judge Irwin replaced at the power company. The letter, a suicide note,
reveals that the judge received a great deal of stock and the lucrative
position at the power company as a bribe for dismissing a court case brought
against the Southern Belle Fuel Company, which had the same parent company as
American Electric Power.
Littlepaugh
says that he visited Governor Stanton to try to convince him to bring the
matter to light, but Stanton chose to protect his friend the judge; when Miss
Littlepaugh visited the governor after her brother's suicide, he again
protected the judge, and threatened Miss Littlepaugh with prosecution for
insurance fraud. After seven months of digging, Jack has his proof.
Chapter
6 Summary
During
the time Jack is investigating Judge Irwin's background, Tommy Stark, drunk,
wraps his car around a tree, severely injuring the young girl riding with him.
Her father, a trucker, raises a tremendous noise about the accident, but he is
quieted when he is reminded that truckers drive on state highways and many
truckers have state contracts. Lucy is livid about Tommy's crash, even though
Tommy is unhurt; she insists that Willie make him stop playing football and
living his rambunctious life, but Willie says that he won't see his son turn into
a sissy, and that he wants Tommy to have fun.
Willie
is, during this time, completely committed to his six-million-dollar hospital
project, and he insists, to Jack's bemusement, that it will be completed
without any illicit wheeling and dealing. Willie is furious when Tiny Dufiy
tries to convince him to give the contract to Gummy Larson, a Mac-Murfee
supporter who would throw his support to Willie if he received the building
contract. (He would also throw a substantial sum of money to Tiny himself.) But
Willie insists that the project will be completely clean, and seems to think of
it as his legacy--he even says that he does not care whether it wins him any
votes. He insists as well that Jack convince Adam Stanton to run it.
Jack
knows that Adam hates the entire Stark administration, but he visits his
friend's apartment to make the offer nevertheless. Adam is outraged, but he
seems tempted when Jack points out how much good he would be able to do as
director of the hospital. Eventually, after Anne becomes involved, Adam agrees
to take the job. He has a conversation with Willie during which Willie espouses
his moral theory--that the only thing for a man to do is create goodness out of
badness, because everything is bad, and the only reason something becomes good
is because a person thinks it makes things better. Adam is wary of Willie, but
he still takes the job--after he receives Willie's promise not to interfere in
the running of the hospital.
During
this time Jack learns that Anne has found out that Adam received the offer to
run the hospital. She visits Jack, and says that she desperately wants Adam to
take it. In a moment of bitterness, Jack tells her about how her father
illegally protected Judge Irwin after he took the bribe. Anne is crushed; but
she visits Adam with the information, and that is what prompts Adam to
compromise his ideals and take the directorship. Anne, Adam, and Jack attend a
speech Willie gives, during which he announces his intention to give the
citizens of the state free medical care and free educations. Anne asks urgently
if Willie really means it, and Jack replies, "How the hell should I
know?"
But
something nags the back of Jack's mind: he is unable to figure out how Anne
learned that Adam had been offered the directorship of the hospital. Adam
didn't tell her, and Willie says that he didn't tell her, and Jack didn't tell
her. He finds out that Sadie Burke told her, in a jealous rage—for Sadie says
that Anne is Willie's new slut, that she has become his mistress. Jack is
shocked, but when he visits Anne, she gives him a wordless nod that confirms
Sadie's accusation.
Chapter
7 Summary
After
learning about Anne's afiair with Willie Stark, Jack ees westward. He spends
several days driving to California, then, after he arrives, three days in Long
Beach. On the way, he remembers his past with Anne Stanton, and tries to
understand what happened that led her to Willie. When they were children, Jack
spent most of his time with Adam Stanton, and Anne simply tagged along. But the
summer after his junior year at the State University, when he was twenty-one
and Anne was seventeen, Jack fell in love with Anne, and spent the summer with
her. They played tennis together, and swam together at night, and pursued an
increasingly intense physical relationship-- Jack remembers that Anne was not
prudish, that she seemed to regard her body as something they both possessed,
and that they had to explore together. Two nights before Anne was scheduled to
leave for her boarding school, they found themselves alone in Jack's house
during a thunderstorm, and nearly made love for the first time--but Jack
hesitated, and then his mother came home early, ending their chance. The next
day Jack tried to convince Anne to marry him, but she demurred, saying that she
loved him, but seemed to feel that something in his unambitious character was
an impediment to her giving in to her love. After Anne left for school, they
continued to write every day, but their feelings dwindled, and the next few
times they saw each other, things were difierent between them. Over Christmas,
Anne wouldn't let Jack make love to her, and they had a fight about it.
Eventually the letters stopped, and Jack got thrown out of law school, and
began to study history, and then eventually he was married to Lois, a beautiful
sexpot whose friends he despised and who did not interest him as a person.
Toward the end of their marriage, he entered into a phase of the Great Sleep,
and then left her altogether.
After
two years at a very refined women's college in Virginia, Anne returned to
Burden's Landing to care for her ailing father. She was engaged several times
but never married, and after her father died, she became an old maid, though
she kept her looks and her charm. She devoted herself to her work at the orphanage
and her other charities. Jack feels as though she could never marry him because
of some essential confidence he lacked, and that she was drawn to Willie Stark
because he possessed that confidence. Jack also feels that because he revealed
to Anne the truth of her father's duplicity in protecting Judge Irwin after he
accepted the bribe, he is responsible for Anne's afiair with Willie. But he
tries to convince himself that the only human motivation is a certain kind of
biological compulsion, a kind of itch in the blood, and that therefore, he is
not responsible for Anne's behavior.
He
says this attitude was a "dream" that made his trip west deliver on
its promise of "innocence and a new start"--if he was able to believe
the dream.
Chapter
8 Summary
Jack
drives eastward back to his life. He stops at a filling station in New Mexico,
where he picks up an old man heading back to Arkansas. (The old man was driven
to leave for California by the Dust Bowl, but discovered that California was no
better than his home.) The old man has a facial twitch, of which he seems
entirely unaware. Jack, thinking about the twitch, decides that it is a
metaphor for the randomness and causelessness of life--the very ideas he had
been soothing himself with in California, ideas which excused him from
responsibility for Willie and Anne's afiair--and begins to refer to the process
of life as the "Great Twitch."
Feeling
detached from the rest of the world because of his new "secret
knowledge," as he calls the idea of the Great Twitch, Jack visits Willie
and resumes his normal life. He sees Adam a few times and goes to watch him
perform a prefrontal lobotomy on a schizophrenic patient, which seems to him
another manifestation of the Great Twitch. One night, Anne calls Jack, and he meets
her at an all-night drugstore; she tells him that a man named Hubert Coffee
tried to offer Adam a bribe to throw the building contract for the new hospital
to Gummy Larson. In a rage, Adam hit the man, threw himout, and wrote a letter
resigning from his post as director of the hospital.
Anne
asks Jack to convince Adam to change his mind; Jack says that he will try, but
that Adam is acting irrationally, and therefore may not listen to reason. He
says he will tell Willie to bring charges against Hubert Coffee for the
attempted bribe, which will convince Adam that Willie is not corrupt, at least
when it comes to the hospital. Anne offers to testify, but Jack dissuades
her--if she did testify, he says, her afiair with Willie would become agrantly
and unpleasantly public. Jack asks Anne why she has given herself to Willie,
and Anne replies that she loves Willie, and that she will marry him after he is
elected to the Senate next year.
Willie
agrees to bring the charges against Coffee, and Jack is able to persuade Adam
to remain director of the hospital. That crisis is averted,but a more serious
crisis arises when a man named Marvin Frey--a man, not coincidentally, from
MacMurfee's district--accuses Tom Stark of having impregnated his daughter
Sibyl. Then one of MacMurfee's men visits Willie and says that Marvin Frey
wants Tom to marry his daughter--but that Frey will see reason if, say, Willie
were to let MacMurfee win the Senate seat next year. Willie delays his answer,
hoping to come up with a better solution.
In
the meantime, Jack goes to visit Lucy Stark at her sister's poultry farm, where
he explains to her what has happened with Tom. Lucy is crestfallen, and says
that Sibyl Frey's child is innocent of evil and innocent of politics, and
deserves to be cared for.
Willie
comes up with a shrewd solution for dealing with MacMurfee and Frey.
Remembering that MacMurfee owes most of his current political clout, such as it
is, to the fact that Judge Irwin supports him, Willie asks Jack if he was able
to discover anything sordid in Judge Irwin's past. Jack says that he was, but
he refuses to tell Willie what it is until he gives Judge Irwin the opportunity
to look at the evidence and answer for himself.
Jack
travels to Burden's Landing, where he goes for a swim and watches a young
couple playing tennis, feeling a lump in his throat at his memories of Anne. He
then goes to visit the judge, who is happy to see Jack, and who apologizes for
being so angry the last time they spoke. Jack tells the judge what MacMurfee is
trying to do and asks him to call MacMurfee off. The judge says that he refuses
to become mixed up in the matter, and Jack is forced to ask him about the bribe
and Mortimer Littlepaugh's suicide. The judge admits that he did take the
bribe, and accepts responsibility for his actions, saying that he also did some
good in his life. He refuses to give in to the blackmail attempt.
Jack
goes back to his mother's house, where he hears a scream from upstairs. Running
upstairs, he finds his mother sobbing insensibly, the phone receiver off the
hook and on the oor. When she sees Jack she cries out that Jack has killed
Judge Irwin--whom she refers to as Jack's father. Jack learns that Judge Irwin
has committed suicide, by shooting himself in the heart, at the same moment he
learns that Judge Irwin, and not the Scholarly Attorney, was his real father.
Jack realizes that the Scholarly Attorney must have left Jack's mother when he
learned of her afiair with the judge. In a way, Jack is glad to be unburdened
of his father's weakness, which he felt as a curse, and is even glad to have
traded a weak father for a strong one. But he remembers his father giving him a
chocolate when he was a child, and says that he was not sure how he felt.
Jack
goes back to the capital, where he learns the next day that he was Judge
Irwin's sole heir. He has inherited the very estate that the judge took the
bribe in order to save. The situation seems so crazily logical--Judge Irwin
takes the bribe in order to save the estate, then fathers Jack, who tries to
blackmail his father with information about the bribe, which causes Judge Irwin
to commit suicide, which causes Jack to inherit the estate; had Judge Irwin not
taken the bribe, Jack would have had nothing to inherit, and had Jack not tried
to blackmail Judge Irwin, the judge would not have killed himself, and Jack
would not have inherited the estate when he did--so crazily logical that Jack
bursts out laughing. But before long he is sobbing and saying "the poor
old bugger" over and over again. Jack says this is like the ice breaking
up after a long, cold winter.
Chapter
9 Summary
Jack
goes to visit Willie, who asks him about Judge Irwin's death. Jack tells the
Boss that he will no longer have anything to do with blackmail, even on
MacMurfee, and he is set to work on a tax bill. Over the next few weeks, Tom
continues to shine at his football games, but the Sibyl Frey incident has left
Willie irritable and dour as he tries to concoct a plan for dealing with
MacMurfee. In the end, Willie is forced to give the hospital contract to Gummy
Larson, who can control MacMurfee, who can call off Marvin Frey. Jack goes to
the Governor's Mansion the night the deal is made, and finds Willie a drunken
wreck; Willie insults and threatens Gummy Larson, and throws a drink in Tiny
Dufiy's face. Tom continues to spiral out of control. He gets in a fight with
some yokels at a bar, and is suspended for the game against Georgia, which the
team loses. Two games later, Tom is injured in the game against Tech, and is
carried off the field unconscious. Willie watches the rest of the game, which
State wins easily, then goes to the hospital to check on Tom. Jack goes back to
the offce, where he finds Sadie Burke sitting alone in the dark, apparently
very upset. Sadie leaves when Jack tells her about Tom's injury, then calls
from the hospital to tell Jack to come over right away.
Jack
goes to the hospital, where the Boss sends him to pick up Lucy. Jack does so,
and upon their arrival they learn that the specialist Adam Stanton called in to
look at Tom has been held up by fog in Baltimore. Willie is frantic, but
eventually the specialist arrives. His diagnosis matches Adam's: Tom has
fractured two vertebrae, and the two doctors recommend a risky surgery to see
if the damage can be repaired. They undertake the surgery, and Willie, Jack,
and Lucy wait. Willie tells Lucy that he plans to name the hospital after Tom,
but Lucy says that things like that don't matter. At six o'clock in the
morning, Adam returns, and tells the group that Tom will live, but that his
spinal cord is crushed, and he will be paralyzed for the rest of his life. Lucy
takes Willie home, and Jack calls Anne with the news. The operation was
accomplished just before dawn on Sunday. On Monday, Jack sees the piles of telegrams
that have come into the offce from political allies and well-wishers, and talks
to the obsequious Tiny. When Willie comes in, he declares to Tiny that he is
canceling Gummy Larson's contract. He implies that he plans to change the way
things are done at the capital. Jack is taking some tax-bill figures to the
Senate when he learns that Sadie has just stormed out of the offce, and
receives word that Anne has just called with an urgent message.
Jack
goes to see Anne, who says that Adam has learned about her relationship with
Willie, and believes the afiair to be the reason he was given the directorship
of the hospital. She tells Jack that Willie has broken off the afiair because
he plans to go back to his wife. She asks Jack to find Adam and tell him that that
isn't the way things happened. Jack spends the day trying to track down Adam,
but he fails to find him. That night, Jack is paged to go to the Capitol, where
the vote on the tax bill is taking place. Here, Jack greets Sugar-Boy and
watches the Boss talk to his political hangers-on. The Boss tells Jack that he
wants to tell him something. As they walk across the lobby, they see a
rain-and-mud-soaked Adam Stanton leaning against the pedestal of a statue.
Willie reaches out his hand to shake Adam's; in a blur, Adam draws a gun and
shoots Willie, then is shot himself by Sugar-Boy and a highway patrolman. Jack
runs to Adam, who is already dead.
Willie
survives for a few days, and at first the prognosis from the hospital is that
he will recover. But then he catches an infection, and Jack realizes that he is
going to die. Just before the end, he summons Jack to his hospital bed, where
he says over and over again that everything could have been difierent.
After
he dies, he is given a massive funeral. Jack says that the other funeral he
went to that week was quite difierent: it was Adam Stanton's funeral at
Burden's Landing.
Chapter
10 Summary
After
Adam's funeral and Willie's funeral, Jack spends some time in Burden's Landing,
spending his days quietly with Anne. They never discuss Willie's death or
Adam's death; instead they sit wordlessly together, or Jack reads aloud from a
book. Then one day Jack begins to wonder how Adam learned about Anne and
Willie's afiair. He asks her, but she says she does not know-- a man called and
told him, but she does not know who it was. Jack goes to visit Sadie Burke in
the sanitarium where she has gone to recover her nerves. She tells Jack that
Tiny Dufiy (now the governor of the state) was the man who called Adam; and she
confesses that Tiny learned about the afiair from her. She was so angry about
Willie leaving her to go back to Lucy that she told Tiny out of revenge,
knowing that, by doing so, she was all but guaranteeing Willie's death. Jack
blames Tiny rather than Sadie, and Sadie agrees to make a statement which Jack
can use to bring about Tiny's downfall.
A
week later, Dufiy summons Jack to see him. He offers Jack his job back, with a
substantial raise over Jack's already substantial income. Jack refuses, and
tells Tiny he knows about his role in Willie's death. Tiny is stunned, and
frightened, and when Jack leaves he feels heroic. But his feeling of moral
heroism quickly dissolves into an acidic bitterness, because he realizes he is
trying to make Tiny the sole villain as a way of denying his own share of
responsibility. Jack withdraws into numbness, not even opening a letter from
Anne when he receives it. He receives a letter from Sadie with her statement,
saying that she is moving away and that she hopes Jack will let matters
drop--Tiny has no chance to win the next gubernatorial election anyway, and if
Jack pursues the matter Anne's name will be dragged through the mud. But Jack
had already decided not to pursue it.
At
the library Jack sees Sugar-Boy, and asks him what he would do if he learned
that there was a man besides Adam who was responsible for Willie's death.
Sugar-Boy says he would kill him, and Jack nearly tells him about Tiny's role.
But he decides not to at the last second, and instead tells Sugar-Boy that it was
a joke. Jack also goes to see Lucy, who has adopted Sibyl Frey's child, which
she believes is Tom's. She tells Jack that Tom died of pneumonia shortly after
the accident, and that the baby is the only thing that enabled her to live. She
also tells him that she believes--and has to believe--that Willie was a great
man. Jack says that he also believes it.
Jack
goes to visit his mother at Burden's Landing, where he learns that she is
leaving Theodore Murrell, the Young Executive. He is surprised to learn that
she is doing so because she loved Judge Irwin all along. This knowledge changes
Jack's long-held impression of his mother as a woman without a heart, and helps
to shatter his belief in the Great Twitch. At the train station, he lies to his
mother, and tells her that Judge Irwin killed himself not because of anything
that Jack did, but because of his failing health. He thinks of this lie as his
last gift to her.
After
his mother leaves, he goes to visit Anne, and tells her the truth about his
parentage. Eventually, he and Anne are married, and in the early part of 1939,
when Jack is writing his story, they are living in Judge Irwin's house in
Burden's Landing. The Scholarly Attorney, now frail and dying, lives with them.
Jack is working on a book about Cass Mastern, whom he believes he can finally
understand. After the old man dies and the book is finished, Jack says, he and
Anne will leave Burden's Landing--stepping "out of history into history
and the awful responsibility of Time."
(Joseph Heller)
SOME INFO ON
JOSEPH HELLER
b. May 1, 1923,
Brooklyn, N.Y., U.S.
American writer whose novel Catch-22 (1961) was one of the most
significant works of protest literature to appear after World War II. The
satirical novel was both a critical and a popular success, and a film version
appeared in 1970.Heller flew 60 combat missions as a bombardier with the U.S.
Air Force in Europe. He received an M.A. at Columbia University in 1949 and was
a Fulbright scholar at the University of Oxford (1949-50). He taught English at
Pennsylvania State University (1950-52) and worked as an advertising copywriter
for the magazines Time (1952-56) and Look (1956-58) and as promotion manager
for McCall's (1958-61), meanwhile writing Catch-22 in his spare time. The plot
of the novel centres on the antihero Captain John Yossarian, stationed at an
airstrip on a Mediterranean island in World War II, and portrays his desperate
attempts to stay alive. The "catch" in Catch-22 involves a mysterious
Air Force regulation, which asserts that a man is considered insane if he
willingly continues to fly dangerous combat missions; but, if he makes the
necessary formal request to be relieved of such missions, the very act of
making the request proves that he is sane and therefore ineligible to be
relieved. The term Catch-22 thereafter entered the English language as a
reference to a proviso that trips one up no matter which way one turns.His
later novels including Something Happened (1974), an unrelievedly pessimistic
novel, Good as Gold (1979), a satire on life in Washington, D.C., and God Knows
(1984), a wry, contemporary-vernacular monologue in the voice of the biblical
King David, were less successful. Closing Time, a sequel to Catch-22, appeared
in 1994. Heller's dramatic work includes the play We Bombed in New Haven
(1968).
CONTEXT
Joseph Heller
was born in Brooklyn in 1923. He served as an Air Force bombardier in World War
II, and has enjoyed a long career as a writer and a teacher. His bestselling
books include Something Happened, Good as Gold, Picture This, God Knows, and
Closing Time--but his first novel, Catch-22, remains his most famous and acclaimed
work.
Written while
Heller worked producing ad copy for a New York City marketing firm, Catch-22
draws heavily on Heller's Air Force experience, and presents a war story that
is at once hilarious, grotesque, bitterly cynical, and utterly stirring. The
novel generated a great deal of controversy upon its publication; critics
tended either to adore it or despise it, and those who hated it did so for the
same reason as the critics who loved it. Over time, Catch-22 has become one of
the defining novels of the twentieth century. It presents an utterly
unsentimental vision of war, stripping all romantic pretense away from combat,
replacing visions of glory and honor with a kind of nightmarish comedy of
violence, bureaucracy, and paradoxical madness.
Unlike other
anti-romantic war novels, such as Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front,
Catch-22 relies heavily on humor to convey the insanity of war, presenting the
horrible meaninglessness of armed conflict through a kind of desperate
absurdity, rather than through graphic depictions of suffering and violence.
Catch-22 also distinguishes itself from other anti-romantic war novels by its
core values: Yossarian's story is ultimately not one of despair, but one of
hope; the positive urge to live and to be free can redeem the individual from
the dehumanizing machinery of war. The novel is told as a disconnected series
of loosely related, tangential stories in no particular chronological order;
the final narrative that emerges from this structural tangle upholds the value
of the individual in the face of the impersonal, collective military mass; at
every stage, it mocks insincerity and hypocrisy even when they appear to be
triumphant.
SUMMARY FOR
"CATCH-22"
Chapters 1-5
Yossarian is in
a military hospital in Italy with a liver condition that isn't quite jaundice.
He is not really even sick, but he prefers the hospital to the war outside, so
he pretends to have a pain in his liver. The doctors are unable to prove him
wrong, so they let him stay, perplexed at his failure to develop jaundice.
Yossarian shares the hospital ward with his friend Dunbar; a bandaged, immobile
man called the soldier in white; and a pair of nurses Yossarian suspect hate
him. One day an affable Texan is brought into the ward, where he tries to
convince the other patients that "decent folk" should get extra
votes. The Texan is so nice that everyone hates him. A chaplain comes to see
Yossarian, and although he confuses the chaplain badly during their
conversation, Yossarian is filled with love for him. Less than ten days after
the Texan is sent to the ward, everyone but the soldier in white flees the
ward, recovering from their ailments and returning to active duty.
Outside the
hospital there is a war going on, and millions of boys are bombing each other
to death. No one seems to have a problem with this arrangement except
Yossarian, who once argued with Clevinger, an officer in his group, about the
war. Yossarian claimed that everyone was trying to kill him. Clevinger argued
that no one was trying to kill Yossarian personally, but Yossarian has no
patience for Clevinger's talk of countries and honor and insists that they are
trying to kill him. After being released from the hospital, Yossarian sees his
roommate Orr and notices that Clevinger is still missing. He remembers the last
time he and Clevinger called each other crazy, during a night at the officers'
club when Yossarian announced to everyone present that he was superhuman
because no one had managed to kill him yet. Yossarian is suspicious of everyone
when he gets out of the hospital; he has a meal in Milo's mess hall, then talks
to Doc Daneeka, who enrages Yossarian by telling him that Colonel Cathcart has
raised to fifty the number of missions required before a soldier can be
discharged. The previous number was forty-five. Yossarian has flown forty
missions.
Yossarian talks
to Orr, who tells him an irritating story about how he liked to keep crab
apples in his cheeks when he was younger. Yossarian briefly remembers the time
a whore had beaten Orr over the head with her shoe in Rome outside Nately's
whore's kid sister's room. Yossarian notices that Orr is even smaller than
Huple, who lives near Hungry Joe's tent. Hungry Joe has nightmares whenever he
isn't scheduled to fly a mission the next day; his screaming keeps the whole
camp awake. Hungry Joe's tent is near a road where the men sometimes pick up
girls and take them out to the the tall grass near the open-air movie theater
that a U.S.O. troupe visited that same afternoon. The troupe was sent by an
ambitious general named P.P. Peckem, who hopes to take over the command of
Yossarian's wing from General Dreedle. General Peckem's troubleshooter Colonel
Cargill, who used to be a spectacular failure as a marketing executive and who
is now a spectacular failure as a colonel. Yossarian feels sick, but Doc
Daneeka still refuses to ground him. Doc Daneeka advises Yossarian to be like
Havermeyer and make the best of it; Havermeyer is a fearless lead bombardier.
Yossarian thinks that he himself is a lead bombardier filled with a very
healthy fear. Havermeyer likes to shoot mice in the middle of the night; once,
he woke Hungry Joe and caused him to dive into one of the slit trenchs that
have appeared nightly beside every tent since Milo Minderbinder, the mess
officer, bombed the squadron.
Hungry Joe is
crazy, and though Yossarian tries to help him, Hungry Joe won't listen to his
advice because he thinks Yossarian is crazy. Doc Daneeka doesn't believe Hungry
Joe has problems--he thinks only he has problems, because his lucrative medical
practice was ended by the war. Yossarian remembers trying to disrupt the
educational meeting in Captain Black's intelligence tent by asking unanswerable
questions, which caused Group Headquarters to make a rule that the only people
who could ask questions were the ones who never did. This rule comes from
Colonel Cathcart and Lieutenant Colonel Korn, who also approved the skeet
shooting range where Yossarian can never hit anything. Dunbar loves shooting
skeet because he hates it and it makes the time go more slowly; his goal is to
live as long as possible by slowing down time, so he loves boredom and
discomfort, and he argues about this with Clevinger.
Doc Daneeka
lives in a tent with an alcoholic Indian named Chief White Halfoat, where he
tells Yossarian about some sexually inept newlyweds he had in his office once.
Chief White Halfoat comes in and tells Yossarian that Doc Daneeka is crazy and
then relates the story of his own family: everywhere they went, someone struck
oil, and so oil companies sent agents and equipment to follow them wherever
they went. Doc Daneeka still refuses to ground Yossarian, who asks if he would
be grounded if he were crazy. Doc Daneeka says yes, and Yossarian decides to go
crazy. But that solution is too easy: there is a catch. Doc Daneeka tells
Yossarian about Catch-22, which holds that, to be grounded for insanity, a
pilot must ask to be grounded, but that any pilot who asks to be grounded must
be sane. Impressed, Yossarian takes Doc Daneeka's word for it, just as he had
taken Orr's word about the flies in Appleby's eyes. Orr insists there are flies
in Appleby's eyes, and though Yossarian has no idea what Orr means, he believes
Orr because he has never lied to him before. They once told Appleby about the
flies, so that Appleby was worried on the way to a briefing, after which they
all took off in B-25s for a bombing run. Yossarian shouted directions to the
pilot, McWatt, to avoid antiaircraft fire while Yossarian dropped the bombs.
Another time while they were taking evasive action Dobbs went crazy and started
screaming "Help him," while the plane spun out of control and
Yossarian believed he was going to die. In the back of the plane, Snowden was
dying.
Chapters 6-10
Hungry Joe has
his fifty missions, but the orders to send him home never come, and he
continues to scream all through every night. Doc Daneeka persists in feeling
sorry for himself while ignoring Hungry Joe's problems. Hungry Joe is driven
crazy by noises, and is mad with lust--he is desperate to take pictures of
naked women, but the pictures never come out. He pretends to be an important
Life magazine photographer, and the irony is that he really was a photographer
for Life before the war. Hungry Joe has flown six tours of duty, but every time
he finishes one Colonel Cathcart raises the number of missions required before
Hungry Joe is sent home. When this happens, the nightmares stop until Hungry
Joe finishes another tour. Colonel Cathcart is very brave about sending his men
into dangerous situations--no situation is too dangerous, just as no ping-pong
shot is too hard for Appleby. One night Orr attacked Appleby in the middle of a
game; a fight broke out, and Chief White Halfoat busted Colonel Moodus, General
Dreedle's son-in-law, in the nose. General Dreedle enjoyed that so much he kept
calling Chief White Halfoat in to repeat the performance--but the Indian
remains a marginal figure in the camp, much like Major Major, who was promoted
to squadron commander while playing basketball and who has been ostracized ever
since. Also, Ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen explains to Yossarian how Catch-22 requires
him to fly the extra missions Colonel Cathcart orders, even though
Twenty-Seventh Air Force regulations only demand forty missions.
Yossarian's
pilot, McWatt, is possibly the craziest of all the men, because he is perfectly
sane but he does not mind the war. He is smiling and polite and loves to whistle
show tunes. He is impressed with Milo--but not as impressed as Milo was with
the letter Yossarian got from Doc Daneeka about his liver, which ordered the
mess hall to give Yossarian all the fresh fruit he wanted, which, in turn,
Yossarian refused to eat, because if his liver improved he couldn't go to the
hospital whenever he wanted. Milo is involved in the black market, and he tries
to convince Yossarian to go in with him in selling the fruit, but Yossarian
refuses. Milo is indignant when he learns that a C.I.D. (Criminal Investigation
Division) man is searching for a criminal who has been forging Washington
Irving's name in censored letters--it is Yossarian who used to pass time in the
hospital by writing the letters. But Milo is convinced the C.I.D. man is trying
to set him up because of his black market activity. Milo wants to organize the
men into a syndicate, as he demonstrates by returning McWatt's stolen bedsheet
in pieces--half for McWatt, a quarter for Milo, and so on. Milo has a grasp on
some confusing economics: he manages to make a profit buying eggs in Malta for
seven cents apiece and selling them in Pianosa for five cents apiece.
Not even
Clevinger understands that, but though he is a dope, he usually understands
everything, except why Yossarian insists that so many people are trying to kill
him. Yossarian remembers training in America with Clevinger under Lieutenant
Scheisskopf, who was obsessed with parades, and whose wife, along with her
friend Dori Duz, used to sleep with all the men under her husband's command.
Lieutenant Scheisskopf hated Clevinger, and finally got him sent to trial under
a belligerant colonel. Clevinger is stunned when he realizes that Lieutenant
Scheisskopf and the colonel truly hate him, in a way that no enemy soldier ever
could.
Given a
horrible name at birth because of his father's horrible sense of humor, Major
Major Major was chagrined when, the day he joined the army, he was promoted to
Major by an IBM machine with an equally horrible sense of humor, making him
Major Major Major Major. Major Major Major Major also looks vaguely like Henry
Fonda, and did so well in school that he was suspected of being a Communist and
monitored by the FBI. His sudden promotion stunned his drill sergeant, who had
to train a man who was suddenly his superior officer. Luckily, Major Major
applied for aviation cadet training, and was sent to Lieutenant Scheisskopf.
Not long after arriving in Pianosa, he was made squadron commander by an irate
Colonel Cathcart, after which he lost all his new friends. Major Major has
always been a drab, mediocre sort of person, and had never had friends before;
he lapses into an awkward depression and refuses to be seen in his office
except when he isn't there. To make himself feel better, Major Major forges
Washington Irving's name to official documents. He is confused about
everything, including his official relationship to Major ----- de Coverley, his
executive officer: He doesn't know whether he is Major ----- de Coverlay's
subordinate, or vice versa. A C.I.D. man comes to investigate the Washington
Irving scandal, but Major Major denies knowledge, and the incompetent C.I.D.
man believes him--as does another C.I.D. man who arrives shortly thereafter,
then leaves to investigate the first C.I.D. man. Major Major takes to wearing
dark glasses and a false mustache when forging Washington Irving's name. One
day Major Major is tackled by Yossarian, who demands to be grounded. Sadly,
Major Major tells Yossarian that there is nothing he can do.
Clevinger's
plane disappeared in a cloud off the coast of Elba, and he is presumed dead.
Yossarian finds the disappearance as stunning as that of a whole squadron of
sixty-four men who all deserted in one day. Then he tells ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen
the news, but ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen isn't impressed with the disappearance.
Ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen continually goes AWOL, then is required to dig holes and
fill them up again--work he seems to enjoy. One day ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen
nicked a water pipe, and water sprayed everywhere, leading to mass confusion
much like that of the night seven months later when Milo bombed the camp. Word
spread that the water was oil, and Chief White Halfoat was kicked off the base.
Around this time, Appleby tried to turn Yossarian in for not taking his Atabrine
tablets, but the only time he was allowed to go into Major Major's office was
when Major Major wasn't there. Yossarian remembers Mudd, a soldier who died
immediately after arriving at the camp, and whose belongings are still in
Yossarian's tent. The belongings are contaminated with death in the same way
that the whole camp was contaminated before the deadly mission of the Great Big
Siege of Bologna, for which Colonel Cathcart bravely volunteered his men.
During this time even sick men were not allowed to be grounded by doctors. Dr.
Stubbs is overwhelmed with cynicism, and asks what the point is of saving lives
when everyone dies anyway. Dunbar says that the point is to live as long as you
can and forget about the fact that you will eventually die.
Chapters 11-16
Captain Black
is pleased to hear the news that Colonel Cathcart has volunteered the men for
the lethally dangerous mission of bombing Bologna. Captain Black thinks the men
are bastards, and gloats about their terrifying, violent task. Captain Black is
extremely ambitious, and hoped to be promoted to squadron commander; when Major
Major was picked over him, he lapsed into a deep depression, which the Bologna
mission lifts him out of. Captain Black first tried to get revenge on Major
Major by initiating the Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade, when he forced all the
men to swear elaborate oaths of loyalty before doing basic things like eating
meals. He refused to let Major Major sign a loyalty oath, and hoped thereby to
make him appear disloyal. The Glorious Loyalty Oath Crusade was a major event
in the camp, until the fearsome Major ----- de Coverley put a stop to it by
hollering "Give me eat!" in the mess hall without signing an oath.
It rains
interminably before the Bologna mission, and the bombing run is delayed by the
rain. The men all hope it will never stop raining, and when it does, Yossarian
moves the bomb line on the map so that the commanding officers will think
Bologna has already been captured. Then the rain starts again. In the meantime,
Ex-P.F.C. Wintergreen tries to sell Yossarian a cigarette lighter, thus going
into competition with Milo as a black market trader. He is aghast that Milo has
cornered the entire world market for Egyptian cotton but is unable to unload
any of it. The men are terrified and miserable over Bologna. Clevenger and
Yossarian argue about whether it is Yossarian's duty to bomb Bologna, and by
the middle of the second week of waiting, everyone in the squadron looks like
Hungry Joe. One night Yossarian, Nately, and Dunbar go for a drunken drive with
Chief White Halfoat; they crash the jeep, and realize it has stopped raining.
Back in the tents, Hungry Joe is trying to shoot Huple's cat, which has been
giving him nightmares, and the men force Hungry Joe to fight the cat fairly.
The cat runs away, and Hungry Joe is the self-satisfied winner; then he goes
back to sleep and has another nightmare about the cat.
Major ----- de
Coverley is a daunting, majestic man with a lion's mane of white hair, an
eagle's gaze, and a transparent eyepatch. Everyone is afraid of him, and no one
will talk to him. His sole duties include travelling to major cities captured
by the Americans and renting rooms for his men to take rest leaves in; he
spends the rest of his time playing horseshoes. He is so good at his room-
renting duties that he always manages to be photographed with the first wave of
American troops moving into a city, a fact which perplexes both the enemy and
the American commanders. Major ----- de Coverley is a force of nature, but when
Yossarian moved the bomb line, he was fooled and traveled to enemy-controlled
Bologna; he still has not returned. Once, Milo approached him on the horseshoe
range and convinced him to authorize Milo to import eggs with Air Force planes.
This elated the men, except for Colonel Cathcart, whose spur-of-the-moment
attempt to promote Major Major failed, unlike his attempt to give Yossarian a
medal some time earlier, which succeeded. Back when Yossarian was brave, he
circled over a target twice in order to hit it; on the second overpass, Mudd
was killed by shrapnel. The authorities didn't know how to rebuke Yossarian for
his foolhardiness, so they decided to stave off criticism by giving him a
medal.
The squadron
finally receives the go-ahead to bomb Bologna, and by this time Yossarian
doesn't feel like going over the target even once. He pretends that his plane's
intercom system is broken and orders his men to turn back. They land at the
deserted airfield just before dawn, feeling strangely morose; Yossarian takes a
nap on the beach and wakes up when the planes fly back. Not a single plane has
been hit. Yossarian thinks that there must have been too many clouds for the
men to bomb the city, and that they will have to make another attempt, but he
is wrong. There was no antiaircraft fire, and the city was bombed with no
losses to the Americans.
Captain
Pilchard and Captain Wren ineffectually reprimand Yossarian and his crew for
turning back, then inform the men that they will have to bomb Bologna again, as
they missed the ammunition dumps the first time. Yossarian confidently flies
in, assuming there will be no antiaircraft fire, and is stunned when shrapnel
begins firing up toward him through the skies. He furiously directs McWatt
through evasive maneuvers, and fights with the strangely cheerful Aarfy until
the bombs are dropped; Yossarian doesn't die, and the plane lands safely. He
heads immediately for emergency rest leave in Rome, where he meets Luciana the
same night.
Luciana is a
beautiful Italian girl Yossarian meets at a bar in Rome. After he buys her
dinner and dances with her, she agrees to sleep with him, but not right
then--she will come to his room the next morning. She does, then angrily
refuses to sleep with Yossarian until she cleans his room--she disgustedly
calls him a pig. Finally, she lets him sleep with her. Afterward, Yossarian
falls in love with her and asks her to marry him; she says she can't marry him
because he's crazy, and he's crazy because he wants to marry her, because no
one in their right mind would marry a girl who wasn't a virgin. She tells him
about a scar she got when the Americans bombed her town. Suddenly, Hungry Joe
rushes in with his camera, and Yossarian and Luciana have to get dressed.
Laughing, they go outside, where they part ways. Luciana gives Yossarian her
number, telling him she expects that he will tear it up as soon as she leaves,
self-impressed that such a pretty girl would sleep with him for free. He asks
her why on Earth he would do such a thing. As soon as she leaves, Yossarian,
self-impressed that such a pretty girl would sleep with him for free, tears up
her number. Almost immediately, he regrets it, and, after learning that Colonel
Cathcart has raised the number of missions to forty, he makes the anguished
decision to go straight to the hospital.
Chapters 17-21
Things are
better at the hospital, Yossarian decides, than they are on a bomb run with
Snowden dying in the back whispering "I'm cold." At the hospital,
Death is orderly and polite, and there is no inexplicable violence. Dunbar is
in the hospital with Yossarian, and they are both perplexed by the soldier in
white, a man completely covered in plaster bandages. The men in the hospital
discuss the injustice of mortality--some men are killed and some aren't, some
men get sick and some don't, with no reference to who deserves what. Some time
earlier Clevinger saw justice in it, but Yossarian was too busy keeping track
of all the forces trying to kill him to listen. Later, he and Hungry Joe
collect lists of fatal diseases with which they worry Doc Daneeka, who is the
only person who can ground Yossarian, according to Major Major. Doc Daneeka
tells Yossarian to fly his fifty-five missions, and he'll think about helping
him.
The first time
Yossarian ever goes to the hospital, he is still a private. He feigns an
abdominal pain, then mimics the mysterious ailment of the soldier who saw
everything twice. He spends Thanksgiving in the hospital, and vows to spend all
future Thanksgivings there; but he spends the next Thanksgiving in bed with
Lieutenant Scheisskopf's wife, arguing about God. Once Yossarian is
"cured" of seeing everything twice, he is asked to pretend to be a
dying soldier for a mother and father who have traveled to see their son, who
died that morning. Yossarian allows them to bandage his face, and pretends to
be the soldier.
The ambitious
Colonel Cathcart browbeats the chaplain, demanding prayer before each bombing
run, then abandons the idea when he realizes that the Saturday Evening Post,
where he got the idea, probably wouldn't give him any publicity for it. The
chaplain timidly mentions that some of the men have complained about Colonel
Cathcart's habit of raising the number of missions required every few weeks,
but Colonel Cathcart ignores him. On his way home, the chaplain meets Colonel
Korn, Colonel Cathcart's wily, cynical sidekick, who mocks Colonel Cathcart in
front of the chaplain and is highly suspicious of the plum tomato Colonel
Cathcart gave the chaplain. At his tent in the woods, the chaplain encounters
the hostile Corporal Whitcomb, his atheist assistant, who resents him deeply
for holding back his career. Corporal Whitcomb tells the chaplain that a C.I.D.
man suspects him of signing Washington Irving's name to official papers, and of
stealing plum tomatoes. The poor chaplain is very unhappy, helpless to improve
anyone's life.
Colonel
Cathcart is preoccupied with the problem of Yossarian, who has become a real
black eye for him, most recently by complaining about the number of missions,
but previously by appearing naked at his own medal ceremony shortly after
Snowden's death. Colonel Cathcart wishes he knew how to solve the problem and
impress General Dreedle, his commanding officer. General Dreedle doesn't care
what his men do, as long as they remain reliable military quantities. He
travels everywhere with a buxom nurse, and worries mostly about Colonel Moodus,
his despised son in law, whom he occasionally asks Chief White Halfoat to punch
in the nose. Once Colonel Korn tried to undercut Colonel Cathcart by giving a
flamboyant briefing to impress General Dreedle; General Dreedle told Colonel
Cathcart that Colonel Korn made him sick.
Chapters 22-26
Yossarian loses
his nerve on the mission that follows Colonel Korn's extravagant briefing, the
mission where Snowden is killed and spattered all over Yossarian's uniform when
Dobbs goes crazy and seizes the plane's controls from Huple. As he dies,
Snowden pleads with Yossarian to help him; he says he is cold. Dobbs is a
terrible pilot and a wreck of a man, and he later tells Yossarian he plans to
kill Colonel Cathcart before he raises the mission total again; he asks
Yossarian to give him the go-ahead, but Yossarian is unable to do so, so Dobbs
abandons his plan. Yossarian thinks that Dobbs is almost as bad as Orr, with
whom Yossarian and Milo recently took a trip to stock up on supplies. As they
travel, Orr and Yossarian gradually realize the extent of Milo's control over
the black market and vast international influence: he is the mayor of Palermo,
the Assistant Governor-General of Malta, the Vice-Shah of Oran, the Caliph of
Baghdad, the Imam of Damascus, the Sheik of Araby, and is worshipped as a god
in parts of Africa. Each region has embraced him because he revitalized their
economy with his syndicate, in which everybody has a share. Nevertheless,
throughout their trip, Orr and Yossarian are forced to sleep in the plane while
Milo enjoys lavish palaces, and they are finally awakened in the middle of the
night so that Milo can rush his shipment of red bananas to their next stop.
One evening
Nately finds his whore in Rome again after a long search. He tries to convince
Yossarian and Aarfy to take two of her friends for thirty dollars each. Aarfy
objects that he has never had to pay for sex. Nately's whore is sick of Nately,
and begins to swear at him; then Hungry Joe arrives, and the group abandons
Aarfy and goes to the apartment building where the girls live. Here they find a
seemingly endless flow of naked young women; Hungry Joe is torn between taking
in the scene and rushing back for his camera. Nately argues with an old man who
lives at the building about nationalism and moral duty--the old man claims
Italy is doing better than America in the war because it has already been
occupied, so Italian boys are no longer being killed. He gleefully admits to
swearing loyalty to whatever nation happens to be in power. The patriotic,
idealistic Nately cannot believe his ears, and argues somewhat haltingly for
America's international supremacy and the values it represents. But he is
troubled because, though they are absolutely nothing alike, the old man reminds
him of his father.
By April,
Milo's influence is massive. The mess officer controls the international black
market, plays a major role in the world economy, and uses Air Force planes from
countries all over the world to carry shipments of his supplies; the planes are
repainted with an "M & M Enterprises" logo, but Milo continues to
insist that everybody has a share in his syndicate. Milo contracts with the
Germans to bomb the Americans, and with the Americans to shoot down German
planes. German anti-aircraft guns contracted by Milo even shot down Mudd, the
dead man in Yossarian's tent, for which Yossarian holds a grudge against Milo.
Milo wants Yossarian's help concocting a solution for unloading his massive
holdings of Egyptian cotton, which he cannot sell and which threatens to ruin
his entire operation. One evening after dinner, Milo's planes begin to bomb
Milo's own camp: He has landed another contract with the Germans, and dozens of
men are wounded and killed during the attack. Almost everyone wants to end M
& M Enterprises right then, but Milo shows them how much money they have
all made, and the survivors almost all forgive him. While Yossarian sits naked
in a tree watching Snowden's funeral, Milo seeks him out to talk to him about
the cotton; he gives Yossarian some chocolate-covered cotton and tries to
convince him it is really candy. Yossarian tells Milo to ask the government to
buy his cotton, and Milo is struck by the intelligence behind the idea.
The chaplain is
troubled. No one seems to treat him as a regular human being; everyone is
uncomfortable in his presence, he is intimidated by the soldiers--especially
Colonel Cathcart--and he is generally ineffectual as a religious leader. He
grows increasingly miserable, and is sustained solely by the thought of the
religious visions he has seen since his arrival, such as the vision of the
naked man in the tree at Snowden's funeral. Of course, the naked man was Yossarian.
He dreams of his wife and children dying horribly in his absence. He tries to
see Major Major about the number of missions the men are asked to fly, but,
like everyone else, finds that Major Major will not allow him into his office
except when he is out. On the way to see Major Major a second time, the
chaplain encounters Flume, Chief White Halfoat's old roommate who is so afraid
of having his throat slit while he sleeps that he has taken to living in the
forest. The chaplain then learns that Corporal Whitcomb has been promoted to sergeant
by Colonel Cathcart for an idea that the colonel believes will land him in the
Saturday Evening Post. The chaplain tries to mingle with the men at the
officers' club, but Colonel Cathcart periodically throws him out. The chaplain
takes to doubting everything, even God.
The night
Nately falls in love with his whore, she sits naked from the waist down in a
room full of enlisted men playing blackjack. She is already sick of Nately, and
tries to interest one of the enlisted men, but none of them notice her. Nately
follows her out, then to the officers' apartments in Rome, where she tries the
same trick on Nately's friends. Aarfy calls her a slut, and Nately is deeply
offended. Aarfy is the navigator of the flight on which Yossarian is finally
hit by flak; he is wounded in the leg and taken to the hospital, where he and
Dunbar change identities by ordering lower-ranking men to trade beds with them.
Dunbar pretends to be A. Fortiori. Finally they are caught by Nurse Cramer and
Nurse Duckett, who takes Yossarian by the ear and puts him back to bed.
Chapters 27-31
The next
morning, while Nurse Duckett is smoothing the sheets at the foot of his bed,
Yossarian thrusts his hand up her skirt. She shrieks and rushes away, and
Dunbar grabs her bosom from behind. When she is finally rescued by a furious
doctor, Yossarian tries to plead insanity--he says he has a recurring dream
about a fish--so he is assigned an appointment with Major Sanderson, the
hospital psychiatrist. Sanderson is more interested in discussing his own
problems than his patient's. Yossarian's friends visit him in the
hospital--Dobbs offers again to kill Colonel Cathcart--and finally, after
Yossarian admits that he thinks people are trying to kill him and that he has not
adjusted to the war, Major Sanderson decides that Yossarian really is crazy and
decides to send him home. But because of the identity mixup perpetrated by
Yossarian and Dunbar earlier in their hospital stay, there is a mistake, and A.
Fortiori is sent home instead. Furiously, Yossarian goes to see Doc Daneeka,
but Doc Daneeka will not ground Yossarian for reasons of insanity. Who else but
a crazy man, he asks, would go out to fight?
Yossarian goes
to see Dobbs, and tells him to go ahead and kill Colonel Cathcart. But Dobbs
has finished his sixty missions, and is waiting to be sent home; he no longer
needs to kill Colonel Cathcart. When Yossarian says that Colonel Cathcart will
simply raise the number of missions again, Dobbs says he'll wait and see, but that
perhaps Orr would help Yossarian kill the colonel. Orr crashed his plane again
while Yossarian was in the hospital and was fished out of the ocean--none of
the life jackets in his plane worked, because Milo took out the carbon dioxide
tanks to use for making ice-cream sodas. Now, Orr is tinkering with the stove
he is trying to build in his and Yossarian's tent; he suggests that Yossarian
should try flying a mission with him for practice in case he ever has to make a
crash landing. Yossarian broods about the rumored second mission to Bologna.
Orr is making noise and irritating him, and Yossarian imagines killing him,
which Yossarian finds a relaxing thought. They talk about women--Orr says they
don't like Yossarian, and Yossarian replies that they're crazy. Orr tells
Yossarian that he knows Yossarian has asked not to fly with him, and offers to
tell Yossarian the story of why that naked girl was hitting him with her shoe
outside Nately's whore's kid sister's room in Rome. Yossarian laughingly
declines, and the next time Orr goes up he again crashes his plane into the
ocean. This time, his survival raft drifts away from the others and disappears.
The men are
dismayed when they learn that General Peckem has had Scheisskopf, now a
colonel, transferred onto his staff. Peckem is pleased because he thinks the
move will increase his strength compared to that of his rival General Dreedle.
Colonel Scheisskopf is dismayed by the news that he will no longer be able to
conduct parades every afternoon. Scheisskopf immediately irritates his
colleagues in Group Headquarters, and Peckem takes him along for an inspection
of Colonel Cathcart's squadron briefing. At the preliminary briefing, the men
are displeased to learn they will be bombing an undefended village into rubble simply
so that Colonel Cathcart can impress General Peckem with the clean aerial
photography their bomb patterns will allow. When Peckem and Scheisskopf arrive,
Cathcart is angry that another colonel has appeared to rival him. He gives the
briefing himself, and though he feels shaky and unconfident, he makes it
through, and congratulates himself on a job well done under pressure.
On the bombing
run, Yossarian flashes back to the mission when Snowden died, and he snaps.
During evasive action, he threatens to kill McWatt if he doesn't follow orders.
He is worried that McWatt will hold a grudge, but after the mission McWatt only
seems concerned about Yossarian. Yossarian has begun seeing Nurse Duckett, and
he enjoys making love to her on the beach. Sometimes, while they sit looking at
the ocean, Yossarian thinks about all the people who have died underwater,
including Orr and Clevinger. One day, McWatt is buzzing the beach in his plane
as a joke, when a gust of wind causes the plane to drop for a split second--just
long enough for the propellor to slice Kid Sampson in half. Kid Samson's body
splatters all over the beach. Back at the base, everyone is occupied with the
disaster; McWatt will not land his plane, but keeps flying higher and higher.
Yossarian runs down the runway yelling at McWatt to come down, but he knows
what McWatt is going to do, and McWatt does it, crashing his plane into the
side of a mountain, killing himself. Colonel Cathcart is so upset that he
raises the number of missions to sixty-five.
When Colonel
Cathcart learns that Doc Daneeka was also killed in the crash, he raises the
number of missions to seventy. Actually, Doc Daneeka was not killed in the
crash, but the records--which Doc Daneeka, hating to fly, bribed Yossarian to
alter--maintain that the doctor was in the plane with McWatt, collecting some
flight time. Doc Daneeka is startled to hear that he is dead, but Doc Daneeka's
wife in America, who receives a letter to that effect from the military, is
shattered. Heroically, she finds the strength to carry on, and is cheered to
learn that she will be receiving a number of monthly payments from various
military departments for the rest of her life, as well as sizable life
insurance payments from her husband's insurance company. Husbands of her
friends begin to flirt with her, and she dies her hair. In Pianosa, Doc Daneeka
finds himself ostracized by the men, who blame him for the raise in the number
of missions they are required to fly. He is no longer allowed to practice
medicine and realizes that, in one sense, he really is dead. He sends a
passionate letter to his wife begging her to alert the authorities that he is
still alive. She considers the possibility, but after receiving a form letter
from Colonel Cathcart expressing regret over her husband's death, she moves her
children to Lansing, Michigan and leaves no forwarding address.
Chapters 32-37
The cold
weather comes, and Kid Sampson's legs are left on the beach; no one will
retrieve them. The first things Yossarian remembers when he wakes up each
morning are Kid Sampson's legs and Snowden. When Orr never returns, Yossarian
is given four new roommates, a group of shiny-faced twenty- one year-olds who
have never seen combat. They clown around, calling Yossarian "Yo-Yo"
and rousing in him a murderous hatred. Yossarian tries to convince Chief White
Halfoat to move in with them and scare the new officers away, but Halfoat has
decided to move into the hospital to die of pneumonia. Slowly, Yossarian begins
to feel more protective toward the men, but then they burn Orr's birch logs and
suddenly move Mudd's belongings out of the tent--the dead man who has lived
there for so long is abruptly gone. Yossarian panics and flees to Rome with
Hungry Joe the night before Nately's whore finally gets a good night's sleep
and wakes up in love.
In Rome,
Yossarian misses Nurse Duckett and goes searching in vain for Luciana. Nately
languishes in bed with his whore, when suddenly Nately's whore's kid sister
dives into bed with them. Nately begins to cherish wild fantasies of moving his
whore and her sister back to America and bringing the sister up like his own
child, but when his whore hears that he no longer wants her to go out hustling
she becomes furious, and an argument ensues. The other men try to intervene, and
Nately tries to convince them that they can all move to the same suburb and
work for his father. He tries to forbid his whore from ever speaking again to
the old man in the whores' hotel, and she becomes even angrier, but she still
misses Nately when he leaves and is furious with Yossarian when he punches
Nately in the face, breaking his nose.
Yossarian
breaks Nately's nose on Thansksgiving, after Milo gets all the men drunk on
bottles of cheap whiskey. Yossarian goes to bed early, but wakes up to the sound
of machine gun fire. At first he is terrified, but he quickly realizes that a
group of men are firing machine guns as a prank. He is furious, and takes his
.45 in pursuit of revenge. Nately tries to stop him, and Yossarian breaks his
nose. He fires at someone in the darkness, but when a return shot comes
Yossarian recognizes it as Dunbar's. He and Dunbar call out to each other, and
go back to help Nately. They cannot find him, and discover him in the hospital
the next morning. Yossarian feels terribly guilty for having broken Nately's
nose. They encounter the chaplain in the hospital; he has lied to get in,
claiming to have a disease called Wisconsin shingles, and feels wonderful--he
has learned how to rationalize vice into virtue. Suddenly the soldier in white
is wheeled into the room, and Dunbar panics; he begins screaming, and soon
everyone in the ward joins in. Nurse Duckett warns Yossarian that she overheard
some doctors talking about how they planned to "disappear" Dunbar.
Yossarian goes to warn his friend, but cannot find him.
When Chief
White Halfoat finally dies of pneumonia and Nately finishes his seventy
missions, Yossarian prays for the first time in his life, asking God to keep
Nately from volunteering to fly more than seventy missions. But Nately does not
want to be sent home until he can take his whore with him. Yossarian goes for
help from Milo, who immediately goes to see Colonel Cathcart about having
himself assigned to more combat missions. Milo has finally been exposed as the
tyrannical fraud he is; he has no intention of giving anyone a real share of
the syndicate--but his power and influence are at their peak and everyone
admires him. He feels guilty for not doing his duty and flying missions, and
asks the deferential Colonel Cathcart to assign him to more dangerous combat
duties. Milo tells Colonel Cathcart that someone else will have to run the
syndicate, and Colonel Cathcart volunteers himself and Colonel Korn. When Milo
explains the complex operations of the business to Cathcart, the colonel declares
Milo the only man who could possibly run it, and forbids Milo from flying
another combat mission. He suggests that he might make the other men fly Milo's
missions for him, and if one of those men wins a medal, Milo will get the
medal. To enable this, he says, he will ratchet the number of required missions
up to eighty. The next morning the alarm sounds and the men fly off on a
mission that turns out to be particularly deadly. Twelve men are killed,
including Dobbs and Nately.
The chaplain is
devastated by Nately's death. When he learns that twelve men have been killed,
he prays that Yossarian, Hungry Joe, Nately, and his other friends will not be
among them. But when he rides out to the field, he understands from the
despairing look on Yossarian's face that Nately is dead. Suddenly, the Chaplain
is dragged away by a group of military police who accuse him of an unspecified
crime. He is interrogated by a colonel who claims the chaplain has forged his
name in letters--his only evidence is a letter Yossarian forged in the hospital
and signed with the chaplain's name some time ago. Then he accuses the chaplain
of stealing the plum tomato from Colonel Cathcart and of being Washington
Irving. The men in the room idiotically find him guilty of unspecified crimes
they assume he has committed, then order him to go about his business while
they think of a way to punish him. The chaplain leaves and furiously goes to
confront Colonel Korn about the number of missions the men are required to fly.
He tells Colonel Korn he plans to bring the matter directly to General
Dreedle's attention, but the colonel replies gleefully that General Dreedle has
been replaced with General Peckem as wing commander. He then tells the chaplain
that he and Colonel Cathcart can make the men fly as many missions as they want
to make them fly--they've even transferred Dr. Stubbs, who had offerred to
ground any man with seventy missions, to the Pacific.
General
Peckem's victory sours quickly. On his first day in charge of General Dreedle's
old operation, he learns that Scheisskopf has been promoted to lieutenant
general and is now the commanding officer for all combat operations: He is in
charge of General Peckem and his entire group. And he intends to make every
single man present march in parades.
Chapters 38-42
Yossarian
marches around backwards so no one can sneak up behind him and refuses to fly
in any more combat missions. When they are informed of this, Colonel Cathcart
and Colonel Korn decide to take brief pity on Yossarian for the death of his
friend Nately, and send him to Rome, where he breaks the news of Nately's death
to Nately's whore, who tries to kill Yossarian with a potato peeler for bringer
her the bad news. When he resists, she tries to seduce him, then stabs at him
with a knife again when he seems to have relaxed. Nately's whore's kid sister
materializes, and tries to stab Yossarian as well. Yossarian loses patience,
picks up Nately's whore's kid sister and throws her bodily at Nately's whore,
then leaves the apartment. He notices people are staring at him, and suddenly
realizes that he has been stabbed several times and is bleeding everywhere. He
goes to a Red Cross building and cleans his wounds, and when he emerges
Nately's whore is waiting in ambush and tries to stab him again. He punches her
in the jaw, catches her as she passes out and sets her down gently. Hungry Joe
flies him back to Pianosa, where Nately's whore is waiting to kill him with a
steak knife. He eludes her, but she continues to try to kill him at every
opportunity. Yossarian walks around backwards; as word spreads that he has
refused to fly more combat missions, men begin to approach him, only at night,
and to ask him if it's true, and to tell him they hope he gets away with it.
One day Captain Black tells him that Nately's whore and her kid sister have
been flushed out of their apartment by M.P.'s, and Yossarian, suddenly worried
about them, goes to Rome without permission to try to find them.
He travels with
Milo, who is disappointed in him for refusing to fly more combat missions. Rome
has been bombed, and lies in ruins; the apartment complex where the whores
lived is a deserted shambles. Nately finds the old woman who lived in the
complex sobbing; she tells Yossarian that the only right the soldiers had to
chase the girls away was the right of Catch-22, which says "they have a
right to do anything we can't stop them from doing." Yossarian asks if
they had Catch-22 written down, and if they showed it to her; she says that the
law stipulates that they don't have to show her Catch-22, and that the law that
says so is Catch-22. She says that the her old man is dead. Yossarian goes to
Milo and says that he will fly as many more combat missions as Colonel Cathcart
wants if Milo uses his influence to help him track down the kid sister. Milo
agrees, but becomes distracted when he learns about huge profits to be made in
trafficking illegal tobacco. He slinks away, and Yossarian is left to wander
the dark streets through a horrible night filled with grotesqueries and
loathsome sights; he returns to his apartments late in the night to find that
Aarfy has raped and killed a maid. The M.P.'s burst in. They apologize to Aarfy
for intruding, and arrest Yossarian for being in Rome without a pass.
Back at
Pianosa, Colonel Cathcart and Colonel Korn offer Yossarian a deal: they will
allow him never to fly another combat mission and will even send him home, if
only he will agree to like them. He will be promoted to major and all he will
have to do is to make speeches in America in support of the military and the
war effort, and in support of the two colonels in particular. Yossarian
realizes it is a hideous deal and a frank betrayal of the men in his squadron,
who will still have to fly the eighty missions, but he convinces himself to
take the deal anyway, and is filled with joy at the prospect of going home. On
his way out of Colonel Cathcart's office, Nately's whore appears, disguised as
a private, and stabs him until he falls unconscious.
In the
hospital, a group of doctors argues over Yossarian while the fat, angry colonel
who interrogated the chaplain interrogates him. Finally the doctors knock him
out and operate on him; when he awakes, he dimly perceives visits from Aarfy
and the chaplain. He tells the chaplain about his deal with Cathcart and Korn,
then assures him that he isn't going to do it. He vaguely remembers a
malignant, almost supernatural man jeering at him "We've got your
pal" shortly after his operation,. He then and he tells the chaplain that his
"pal" must have been one of his friends who was killed in the war. He
realizes that his only friend still living is Hungry Joe, and but then the
chaplain tells him that Hungry Joe has died--in his sleep, with Huple's cat on
his face. Later, Yossarian wakes up to find a mean-looking man in a hospital
gown leering saying "We've got your pal." He asks who his pal is, and
the man tells Yossarian that he'll find out. Yossarian lunges for him, but the
man glides away and vanishes. He flashes back to the scene of Snowden's death,
which he relives in all its agony--Snowden smiling at him wanly, whimpering
"I'm cold," Yossarian reassuring him and trying to mend the wound
until he opens up Snowden's flak suit and Snowden's insides spill out all over
him. He then --and remembers the secret he had read in those entrails:
"The spirit gone, man is garbage." man is matter, and without the
spirit he will rot like garbage.
In the
hospital, Yossarian tries to explain to Major Danby why he can no longer go
through with the deal with Cathcart and Korn: he won't sell himself so short,
and he won't betray the memory of his dead friends. He tells Danby he plans to
run away, but Danby tells him there is no hope, and he agrees. Suddenly the
chaplain bursts in with the news that Orr has washed ashore in Sweden.
Yossarian realizes that Orr must have planned his escape all along, and
joyfully decides there is hope after all. He has the chaplain retrieve his
uniform, and decides to desert the army and run to Sweden, where he can save
himself from the madness of the war. As he steps outside, Nately's whore tries
to stab him again, and he runs into the distance.
CHARACTERS’
PROFILE
| ! |
Как писать рефераты Практические рекомендации по написанию студенческих рефератов. |
| ! | План реферата Краткий список разделов, отражающий структура и порядок работы над будующим рефератом. |
| ! | Введение реферата Вводная часть работы, в которой отражается цель и обозначается список задач. |
| ! | Заключение реферата В заключении подводятся итоги, описывается была ли достигнута поставленная цель, каковы результаты. |
| ! | Оформление рефератов Методические рекомендации по грамотному оформлению работы по ГОСТ. |
| → | Виды рефератов Какими бывают рефераты по своему назначению и структуре. |