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

Themes

Sex Work Versus Emotional Labor

After a terse encounter with Sally, Eli reflects on his sexual experiences: He “had never been with a woman longer than a night, and they had always been whores” (56). Eli finds these encounters shallow and lacking in human connection, since paid sex workers merely mimic intimacy. More interested in finding love than physical release, he has “given up on whores entirely, thinking it best to go without rather than pantomime human closeness” (56).

Nevertheless, his attitude toward women remains confused. He has no understanding of how to build an emotional connection with another person because all his relationships (even the one with Charlie, to some degree) are so transactional. With Sally, he falls back on money—the medium of exchange that can procure sex work: He hides $5 beneath the sheets of his bed, in the hopes that the woman will find it and “associate her thoughts of [him] with the notion of a marriage bed” (73). But this stratagem is doomed to failure. Sally is potentially available for paid sex—as Charlie confirms, Sally offers him a variety of paid sexual services, including “the whole thing” (96)—but she cannot be paid into loving Eli or even thinking fondly of him.

Almost all the novel’s women refuse to perform the kind of emotional labor Eli thirsts for. A haggard witch-like crone instead predicts doom for the brothers, while a creepy young girl offers poison and more gloom-filled prophesies. In the Black Skull, a man who pays a beautiful woman to guess which of her hands a piece of silk is in can never win this game—and she has no interest in letting him win, which would turn the monetary transaction into a moment of pity. When freed from sex work, women turn the tables on the men they earlier performed for: Mayfield’s former harem assaults Eli and Charlie, robbing them at gunpoint.

The only woman who does offer emotional connection to the Sisters brothers is their mother. At the end of the novel, she kisses Eli on the cheek and offers the men their childhood bedrooms to sleep in. As Eli and Charlie regress to younger, less powerful, less fraught versions of themselves, their mother is a refuge from the outside world. The ending has an element of optimism: Perhaps, having regressed, the Sisters brothers can reorient their understanding of human connection and go out into the world without the sense that every relationship is a monetary exchange.

Brotherhood

The central brotherly relationship in the novel is at times ambiguous or even negative. Often the brothers are in competition with each other, with Charlie emerging as the more powerful and adept of the two. The Commodore promotes Charlie to lead man at the start of their new job, a role with greater status and pay. This puts strain on their relationship and emphasizes its hierarchical character: Charlie rides with Eli out of duty rather than respect. In fact, Charlie thinks little of Eli’s skills: “you cannot lead your horse without assistance […] You invite sickness and worry. If you were not a blood relative I would have kept you back a long time ago” (57). Charlie sees Eli as a burden hampering his progress, and the novel does little to counter Charlie’s disdain: Eli is incapacitated by a spider bite, is trapped in the witch’s hut, has a bear attack his horse, and falls victim in a variety of other ways.

What Eli lacks in survivalist and hitman skills, he makes up for in his powers of observation, emotional openness, and philosophical bent. Just by being the novel’s narrator, Eli shows the reader his ability to document and experience the world around him. Though he looks up to Charlie and wants his respect, Eli sees how dehumanized Charlie has become with clear eyes. Trapped in the witch’s hut, Eli risks stepping through her cursed doorway to save Tub from a bear—and realizes that “Charlie had not done the same for his own flesh and blood” (42). Seeing how much value Charlie places on physical dominance, Eli worries that his brother will end up another Mayfield or Commodore, a man who wants to command obedience “from behind a wall of well-armed soldiers” (122). And only Eli is open-minded enough to have a transcendent moment of sublimity working with Morris and Warm in the gold-flecked river.

That said, their partnership has an underlying strength, and is never destroyed. As Eli says, at the novel’s end, “our alliance has been broken and mended many times” (324). Despite many arguments, and differing personalities, the brothers work together to ensure each other’s survival in the face of myriad dangers. The strength of this bond is rooted in childhood, forged by the threat of their abusive father. At the end of the novel, the loss of Charlie’s hand brings a changed dynamic in their relationship: Charlie’s newfound weakness and Eli’s new self-assurance mark “the beginning of our new brotherhood” (295).

Pain, Mutilation, and Anesthesia

The Sisters Brothers catalogues physical suffering, bodily destruction, pain, and mutilation—both animal and human. In his dreams, Eli relives the horrific death of his horse, “kicking burning legs, his hot-popping eyeballs” (5-6), and viscerally recalls having his own “leg gouged out” (8). During the brothers’ journey, Eli’s head painfully and grotesquely expands after a spider bite. After a bear scrapes out the eye of another horse, Tub, a stablehand has to dig the rest of the eye out with a spoon. Warm’s formula results in the gruesome deaths of Warm, Morris, and a group of beavers; it also burns Charlie’s hand so badly that he needs an amputation. And that’s just the novel’s major players—plenty of background characters die in grotesque, gory ways.

Characters deal with the trauma of experiencing these physical violations and the secondary trauma of witnessing them in several ways. Denial and dissociation are common, typically expressed through gallows humor: When Tub’s misstep snaps Eli’s mouth shut, he “screamed out from the pain, but in the same breath was laughing at the ridiculousness of it” (22). Another strategy is stoicism and a cynical attitude: Suffering intensely from his burning hand, “bent over in pain, his jaws clenched and locked” (281), Charlie nonetheless carries himself with “the very embodiment of defiance” (281). Both psychological tactics attempt to give a meaning to pain, which helps them rationalize and endure it.

Nevertheless, psychic shielding is rarely enough. For extreme pain, the only solution is anesthetic. Several times during the novel, medical-grade local anesthetic allows surgical interventions to treat bodily damage suffered by the characters. A dentist pulls out Eli’s rotten teeth, a groom removes Tub’s damaged eye, and a physician amputates Charlie’s gangrenous hand. The appeal of the numbness anesthetic brings is clear—and so tempting that characters abuse its powers. Laudanum means it is possible for Tub to his have his eye taken out, but it also prolongs his suffering: He is forced to endure the agony of having alcohol poured into the wound to prevent infection and dies shortly after anyway. Putting him down immediately might have been kinder. Charlie is an alcoholic, using brandy to assuage his mental and physical suffering, only to create hangovers requiring further drink. From liquor, he moves on to self-administering the anesthetic he stole, and then to a dependency on morphine.