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

Symbols & Motifs

Inventions and Ingenuity

DeWitt casts the Wild West as a physical and moral frontier and a technological one. Its lawless spaciousness combines with greed to give rise to a number of inventions that the brothers encounter on their adventure.

Some new technologies are benign and helpful. Several are in the related fields of medicine and hygiene: Watts the dentist introduces the brothers both to toothbrush and toothpaste, a total novelty in the 1850s, and to local anesthetic, which Watts uses to remove his rotten teeth. Other inventions offer connection and communication: the telephone they encounter in the San Francisco hotel and the steam-powered ferry that takes them upriver toward Morris and Warm’s camp. However, the novel also reveals a darker side to human inventive freedom. Warm’s father creates “diabolical, nonsensical” (266) inventions like “The Conclusive Blanket” (266), a mesh of blades that “improves on the guillotine, by allowing the body of the victim to “be cut into numberless tidy cubes” (266).

The novel’s imaginary MacGuffin—the object that motivates the direction of the plot—is Warm’s chemical that illuminates gold underwater. This invention straddles the line between helpful and destructive. Warm does not intend harm, simply wishing to harness his formula’s powers for personal success. However, the chemical can’t help but replicate the effects of the greed that spawned the Gold Rush in the first place, killing not only Warm and Morris but all the dam’s beavers. Thus, in spite of its designer’s intent, it becomes an “evil man-made concoction” (289), a warning about the dangers and hubris of morally unrestrained invention.

Fire and Forgetting

The novel establishes immolation as a grim symbol of the Sisters brothers’ work; at the same time, the complete destruction of fire also operates as a symbol of forgetting. On Charlie and Eli last job for the Commodore, their “unnamed previous horses had been immolated” in a barn (5). Eli cannot get over the images of the horses burning to death—they are the literal stuff of his nightmares—but in the waking world, the fire seems to have wipe clean what happened.

Charlie uses fire to suppress his awareness of the death and suffering he has caused. After the old crone curses the brothers and predicts them being endlessly haunted by the destruction they’ve caused, Charlie burns her hut to the ground to erase the consequences of his actions from his memory. He does a similar thing with the prospectors he and Eli kill near Warm’s camp, wishing to erase the memory of their deaths through fire. Warm concurs, noting that in the heat of a fire “the brain cooks down to nothing” (259), leaving behind no traces of memory.

However, preemptive erasure by fire ultimately fails. The fire used for forgetting turns against its user, spreading out of control and burning unselectively. Warm’s formula causes chemical burns that destroy Charlie’s hand and horrifically kill Warm and Morris, who die while “writhing and tensing and shuddering as though they were slowly being immolated” (286). With them burn all the hopes for a better future Eli had in Morris and Warm’s company. Similarly, fire destroys the brothers’ fortune in Mayfield, along with the woman Eli thinks he loved—and with all of this, the memory of Eli and Charlie’s journey. So much of their inner life is destroyed by fire that at the end of the novel that they are left with nothing.

Dirt and Cleanliness

The world inhabited by Eli and Charlie is filthy. Frontier life severely restricts the ability to change or wash one’s clothes or body. Limited access to soap, hot water, or a place to use them, means that hygiene is either impossible or expensive—Charlie pays 25 cents for a bath. This situation is even worse for travelers and prospectors, who often go weeks without visiting a town while accumulating grime. Little wonder then that cleanliness is fetishized: The wagon teen describes the object of his affection as having “the cleanest hair I have ever seen” (94). Cleanliness represents purity, distinction, and something better.

Conversely, dirt is common, impure, and undesirable. To stop Eli’s infatuation with Sally, Charlie refers to her hair as “mud brown” (95) and suggests that she should “have her smock cleaned” (74). When Eli tries to leave money under her sheets, Charlie says it is futile since she never bothers to change them. Hygiene is a barometer of moral character. When Warm embraced alcohol and crime, he “became dirtier and more depraved all the while, inside and out” (270) until he imagined himself to be made of feces and deliberately walked through crowds trying to rub his filth onto others. In contrast, Warm’s spiritual and moral recovery includes a literal cleaning up. Likewise, at the end of the novel, Charlie finally escapes the grubby world of hired murder by taking a bath.