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

Character Analysis

Charlie Sisters

Charlie Sisters starts the novel as the more confident and cocksure of the two Sisters brothers; this is why the Commodore promotes him to “lead man” (7) on their new job over his younger brother Eli. Charlie’s gunslinging skill imbues him with fearlessness, arrogance, and a willingness to take what he wants: He remorselessly robs and kills numerous people who get in his way on their journey. Moreover, Charlie looks up to powerful men like the Commodore, and wishes to emulate them—Eli worries that in the debauched and corrupt Mayfield, “I was witnessing the earthly personification of Charlie’s future, or proposed future” (122).

However, Charlie’s desire for this type of life, and his previously unassailable self-assurance, are shaken by his encounter with Warm. Hearing about the man’s invention and the Commodore’s intent to steal it, leads Charlie to question for the first time an order to kill. This incipient doubts reach a crisis point when Charlie injures his shooting hand after spilling some of Warm’s formula on it—badly enough to have it amputated soon after. This loss of the source of his power, coupled with the realization about the Commodore’s true nature, leaves Charlie “wondering whom he might be for the rest of his life” (302). Finally, after the hand’s amputation, Charlie’s violent, battling personality evaporates entirely. At the end of the novel, when the former hardened hired gun meekly asks his mother for a bath, Eli comments that “there is not the slightest bit of fight left in him” (323).

Eli Sisters

Eli is more sensitive and philosophical than his older brother Charlie. Unlike Charlie, who venerates the Commodore, Eli from the outset questions the morality of his orders and, more broadly, their way of life. However, Eli’s sentimentality makes him highly emotional, which allows Charlie and others to manipulate him. Charlie can wind Eli up, appealing to familial loyalty to goad Eli into working as an assistant hitman for the Commodore: “Charlie had been able to make use of my temper was all; he had […] exploited my personality, just as a man prods a rooster before a cockfight” (216). Later, Eli is tricked in the restaurant where he is served carrots with the stalks still on and when he is massively underpaid for an excellent black horse. Similarly, the hotel maid Sally plays on Eli’s feelings to get him to leave her money.

The encounter with Warm has a very different effect on Eli than on his brother. While it leads Charlie to be more introspective and questioning, it causes Eli to realize he has spent his life being led. The example of Warm, his creativity and ingenuity, alongside the change in his brother, leads Eli to be more assertive. He learns to trust his gut instinct, channeling his emotions into defending himself, rather than letting others use him. When Eli returns to the restaurant and the waiter snidely remarks that Eli has “given up food entirely” (312), Eli responds, “I will kill you dead where you stand if you don’t hurry up and serve me what I asked for” (312). More dramatically, to free himself from bondage to a man using him for evil ends, Eli murders the Commodore. At the end of the novel, as he relaxes in his childhood bedroom, Eli finally feels at peace—he has the luxury of enjoying his surroundings without outside influence or judgment.

Hermann Kermit Warm

Morris’s initial assessment is that Hermann Warm, the man the Commodore has hired the Sisters brothers to kill, appears to be a low-level eccentric, hauling around books “with a strap like a schoolboy” (8) and possessing “a wild red beard, long, gangly arms, and the protruded belly of a pregnant woman” (7-8). But in person, Eli sees that Warm has “an energy or glow” (263)—a quality he doesn’t fully recognize, wondering, “is this what they call charisma” (263)? It is not merely that Warm has invented something unique in his gold finding chemical. It is that he insists on his freedom of will, imagination, and destiny—traits that draw other toward him and captivates them.

Morris has a dark past. Coming from an early life of poverty, alcoholism, and misanthropy, he believed that he was “actually composed of human waste” (271)—a delusion brought on by scurvy, alcoholism, and solitude. Warm frees himself from his demons by reconnecting with human society, first as a member of the militia, and later as a scientist working in collaboration with another chemistry enthusiast. Warm channels his imagination to productive ends, creating the invention which brings illumination, both literal and metaphorical, to the other characters in the novel.