The Sisters Brothers

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2011

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-18

Chapters 19-30

Chapters 31-40

Chapters 41-52

Chapters 53-64

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Important Quotes

Essay Topics

Chapters 41-52Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 41 Summary

The brothers visit the Black Skull bar where Morris met Warm. The proprietor is playing a strange game with a beautiful woman: She hides a piece of silk in one of her hands and, for a dollar, the man guesses which hand it is in. The proprietor loses each time, and admits that “I have never won” (201). He tells them that Warm and Morris were following the river upstream to its fountainhead.

Chapter 42 Summary

While Charlie gets a drink, Eli checks on Tub. An old stable hand recommends removing his damaged eye and offers to perform the operation for $5. Eli accepts the deal. After they drug Tub with laudanum, the horse collapses, almost causes crushing them. The stable hand removes the bad eye with a spoon and cuts the tendon with scissors. When he pours alcohol into the wound to prevent infection, Tub wakes violently.

Chapter 43 Summary

The brothers visit The Golden Pearl, the most expensive restaurant in town. Eli asks Charlie whether, in light of the revelations in Morris’s diary, they should stop working for the Commodore and abandon the plan to murder Warm. Despite his earlier reservations, Charlie insists that they follow Warm and complete their assignment. Eli decides that this will be his last job for the Commodore.

Chapter 44 Summary

Eli retrieves Tub, again pouring alcohol into the socket where his eye had been. Charlie joins him and they ride out of San Francisco, heading for a ferry which will take them upriver. Eli wishes he could “stop and walk away from Tub, and from the job, and Charlie […] and construct a separate life, with the pale bookkeeper” (219). However, he does nothing to act on this wish.

Chapter 45 Summary

After they get off the ferry upriver, Charlie and Eli track Warm and Morris through a forest on horseback. They discuss the different possibilities open to them. They could extract the formula from Warm, kill him and Morris, and give it to the Commodore as planned. Or they could keep the formula for themselves, although then they “would be hunted all their lives” (222). Alternatively, they could kill the Commodore, though this would again involve a great deal of danger and bloodshed. Either way, both are uneasy about killing Warm and Morris, who are neither bad nor violent men.

Chapter 46 Summary

The brothers locate Warm’s claim—the patch of river he has temporarily leased to prospect for gold. They set up camp and meet a lone prospector heading for San Francisco to spend the gold he has found. Solitude has made him partly unhinged: He offers Eli coffee that is in fact merely dirt. The prospector saw Warm and Morris going to a beaver dam further upriver.

Chapter 47 Summary

On their way to the beaver dam, Eli and Charlie pass a group of dirty and menacing prospectors who do not reply when the brothers ask them if they’ve seen men resembling Warm and Morris nearby. Further up the river, Tub starts coughing and lies down. He refuses to eat or drink and is clearly dying.

Chapter 48 Summary

The brothers finally find Warm and Morris’s camp in a valley next to a beaver dam surrounded by trees. They see Morris in the valley, but Warm ambushes them from a tree and holds them up with his gun. As Morris and Warm debate whether they should kill the brothers, Eli asks whether he and Charlie could join them, claiming to have split from the Commodore. However, Warm has “no faith in your motivations” (239) since the brothers are “a pair of thieves and killers” (239). Warm moves to shoot them but falls backward from the tree as he aims his gun.

Chapter 49 Summary

Morris and Warm manage to escape and return to their camp. When the brothers return to their previous position upriver, they find Tub gone. They then see the horse’s body propped up against a hill, dead. They decide to use force against Morris and Warm.

Chapter 50 Summary

As Eli and Charlie head down the hill to attack Morris and Warm, they see the group of dirty prospectors from downriver approach Warm’s camp. The prospectors want to buy what’s in Warm’s barrels, assuming that it is wine. In actuality, the barrels hold Warm’s gold formula. When a drunk Warm refuses to sell, one of the prospectors threatens him. Warm shoots the lead prospector dead and a firefight ensues; Eli and Charlie jump in to help, killing the remaining two prospectors. They then approach Morris and Warm again. This time, the inventor agrees to let Eli and Charlie work with them on the river and protect them.

Chapter 51 Summary

Eli and Charlie, sitting down for a drink with Warm and Morris, agree to split the profits from the gold they find on the river 50-50. Warm reveals that he tried the formula in the river the previous night and he took in more gold in 15 minutes than a prospector using the standard method of panning would have found in a month. However, the formula badly irritated and damaged the skin on his legs.

Chapter 52 Summary

The next morning Charlie goes for a swim with Morris; Eli and Warm take a walk to find them. Warm asks Eli how he came to work for someone like the Commodore, and Eli explains that they’d had a violent upbringing and got into many fights, which led them to discover “an aptitude for killing” (262). The Commodore offered them work based on their reputation.

Chapters 41-52 Analysis

Ideally, meaningful work unites people in a shared purpose, allowing for a collective sense of belonging. Prospecting for gold, however, radically separates and isolates men, bringing with it despair and madness: Eli observes the man brewing dirt as though it were coffee and decides that “the solitude of working in the wilds is not healthy for a man” (230). Eli and Charlie’s work is scarcely better. Due to their “aptitude for killing,” the Commodore hires them for “muscle work” and “outright murder” (262)—work that embodies even greater alienation than prospecting.

Juxtaposed to this tragic perversion of human work is the colony of beavers on the river. In contrast to the human characters, the beavers are a paradigm of cooperation and productivity. The dam they build and maintain is “bustling with the inscrutable industry” as the beavers communicate to each other “a sentiment of encouragement” (245). The beavers work together and do not fight: Their existence as “cautious, thoughtful animals” (247) contrasts with Eli’s concept of “reversion to the animal” (246)—for him, this means assuming the necessary bestiality to slaughter Warm and Morris.

When Eli and Charlie defend Warm and Morris from another party of prospectors, they see a more productive use for their skills: “to work the river alongside you, and […] protect you against bandits or intruders” (251). They now have a common project. Eli’s growing admiration for Warm is linked to the value of work: “I felt a powerful envy as I watched him. He was reaping the benefits both monetary and spiritual, of his hard labors and intelligence” (255).

Warm shows the brothers that labor can be joyful. He describes testing the formula in the river as “the most pleasing work I’ve taken part in” (255). Picking up illuminated pieces of gold in a river on a starry night is work that celebrates intelligence and imagination: It is the culmination of Warm’s study of chemistry. Also, it is chosen work rather than servitude: Warm, Morris, Eli, and Charlie, no longer work for an exploitative boss but for themselves and each other. This work expresses, rather than effaces, their essential humanity. Unfortunately, this paradisal state will turn out to be fleeting. The chemical that enabled it will ultimately poison and destroy the group, something foreshadowed by the irritation Warm and Morris suffer on their legs. Nevertheless, the experience awakens the Sisters brothers and it sets them on a new path.