The Sisters Brothers

“I know by the dead men following behind you.”

The old woman in the hut knows Charlie and Eli are killers. On one level this suggests she is able to see into a world of spirits beyond the mortal realm. On another level, it suggests that she can sense the repressed trauma and anguish the brother’s carry with them.

“The men were hesitant to loan me their equipment.”

Charlie kills and robs a party of prospectors because they were unwilling to give him an axe. His euphemistic tone describing the event reveals a flippant attitude toward the lives of others. What’s more, their deaths are completely unnecessary: The axe is supposed to allow Eli to avoid walking out of the allegedly cursed door of the old woman’s hut—but Eli does this anyway to save his horse from a bear.

“It is tidier than killing.”

Charlie and Eli’s comment on the business and life of the clothes store owner they have just visited is a play on words: This business is tidier in the sense of not involving blood, and in being more secure and predictable.

“The lawyer’s face transformed to a ridiculous mask of agony and surprise.”

As Eli watches the lawyer, Williams, shot in the chest during a duel, he dissociates from the horror of the situation by highlighting the absurdity and lack of dignity in death.

“I made her a present of five dollars, hiding the coin beneath the sheets, that she might associate her thoughts of me with the notion of a marriage bed.”

Eli’s plan to win over Sally is absurdly naïve. First, as Charlie points out, the woman may not even find the coin. Second, she is unlikely to want to marry him merely because he has given her money. Eli could possibly pay her for sex—a service Charlie claims Sally provides—but Eli could never pay her into loving him.

“I resolved to lose twenty-five pounds of fat and to write her a letter of love and praises.”

Eli’s romantic dreams carry him away as he decides to lose weight in response to Sally’s rejection—ostensibly, because of his size. He does not realize that Sally was simply doing her best to let him down gently and that he has no hope of ever wooing her successfully.

“Here before us was the very thing that had induced thousands of previously intelligent men and women to abandon their families and homes.”

Eli considers rumors about a river in California that, like so many others, is purported to contain gold. As he explains, though, the rush for gold is an irrational mania, based on the dream of striking it lucky. In reality, the average prospector will scarcely find enough gold to buy food.

“Charlie had often been glad and singing as a younger man, before we took up with the Commodore.”

As he watches Charlie singing as he swims and washes in the river, Eli is nostalgic for the carefree Charlie of his youth. Working for the Commodore has made Charlie joyless and cynical, robbing him of his humanity.

“I was witnessing the earthly personification of Charlie’s future, or proposed future.”

As Eli sees Charlie conversing with Mayfield, the criminal boss of a small town, he notes how much Charlie wishes to become like this man. This is not only so that he can enjoy luxury and power, but so that he can order others to commit violence rather than having to risk doing it himself.

“She was paler and not so meaty as the others, her eyes ringed with worry or lack of sleep.”

While the women Mayfield pays for sex cavort in front of them, Eli notices another woman by the door. Her suffering and authenticity mark her and make her attractive to Eli. The woman turns out to be Mayfield’s bookkeeper; Eli establishes an incipient romantic relationship with her.

“She told me she had had a bad dream.”

Outside a house in Mayfield, Eli encounters a young girl who tells him she dreamed she was caught in a swirling black cloud with a dog that she wanted to poison. This story is merely a ruse to distract Eli so she can poison the dog for real.

“He might start out anew with an empty heart, and he should take care to fill it up with only proud things.”

After the brothers kill the trappers who accused them of stealing the bear pelt, they order Mayfield to give up his fortune in compensation. He begs to be allowed to keep some of it, giving a disingenuous speech about how the money might enable him to reinvent himself as a virtuous man. The absurdity and deceitfulness of this effort encourages the brothers to trick him regarding an enemy he has in Oregon City.

“Before that he’d edged up next to craziness.”

Eli remembers his father as always teetering on the verge of complete mental breakdown, but when his father broke their mother’s arm, Charlie and Eli saw that he finally stepped over the line into insanity. Charlie intervened, killing his father, to save Eli and their mother.

“There is a feeling here, which if it gets you, will envenom your very centre.”

A man in San Francisco tells Eli and Charlie about the dangers of the town. The greed and madness of the Gold Rush, and the obsession with making money from it, has infected the place. In turn this will infect, and debase the morals and sanity of, anyone who chooses to stay there.

“I very much wanted to simply quit then, to stop and walk away from Tub, and from the job, and Charlie […] and construct a separate life, with the pale bookkeeper.”

In the final stages of their journey to find and kill Warm, Eli dreams of stopping. He imagines a different, more peaceful and tranquil, life away from the world of organized murder. However, he passively accepts his fate, and makes no effort to realize this alternate vision.

“I should think we would be hunted all their lives.”

The brothers discuss various options in relation to Warm and the formula. If they steal the formula for themselves, the Commodore would chase them the rest of their lives, and they’d always be anxious about being killed. They realize that disobeying the Commodore, or making a clean break from him, is not as easy as they had imagined.

“It would seem to me that the solitude of working in the wilds is not healthy for a man.”

Eli and Charlie meet an unhinged prospector who has convinced himself that dirt is coffee. His insistence on brewing this drink emphasizes the unnatural lonely life of the prospector, which leads to the man confusing illusion and reality. Yet the brothers also experience the same kind of solitude, traveling alone in the wild and growing more and more alienated from other people.

“Why do I relish this reversion to animal?”

While preparing to assault Warm and Morris’s camp and kill them, Eli wonders about his dark, murderous side. This aspect of his personality is usually suppressed, but it allows him to do this work. Yet, the fact that he is questioning this reversion shows he might have the power to control it.

“I suppose the brain cooks down to nothing?”

As he contemplates the charred remains of the prospectors killed and burned the previous evening, Warm wonders how fire has affected their bodies. His rhetorical question affirms his atheistic materialism—his belief that there is no soul or afterlife. It is a poetic comment on the fragility of the body: The seat of consciousness and imagination can boil away like water.

“Let me just say that father had some unnatural habits.”

Warm’s father was forced to leave Berlin and emigrate to America because of some apparently unmentionable practices—possibly scatological in nature. His father’s mental instability helps explain Warm’s own manic delusion, earlier in his life, that he was composed entirely of human feces.

“He updated it so that instead of simply removing a person’s head, the body would be cut into numberless tidy cubes.”

Warm’s strange and misanthropic father created perverse inventions, like this modified guillotine, with which to inflict suffering on others. His father’s actions highlight the dangers that can accompany creative imagination if misdirected.

“The flakes and fragments of gold, which moments earlier were cold and mute, were now […] as distinct as the stars in the sky.”

As Warm’s formula works on the gold in the river, Eli sees the full scientific power and commercial possibilities of this invention. However, he also sees in it something beautiful, linking human imagination and nature.

“It must not have been that I loved the bookkeeper, but that I loved the idea of her loving me, and the idea of not being alone.”

Eli realizes that the bookkeeper he’d made a connection with died in the blaze that destroyed the Mayfield Hotel. His lack of emotional response reveals to him that his feelings for her must have been an illusion (though of course, dissociative numbness has been both brothers’ standard response to horrific death throughout the novel). Eli convinces himself that he had no affection for this woman specifically; that what he really wanted was a bond with another person, who could have been anyone.