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Book 1, Chapter 13
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Our Mutual Friend, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Society, Class, and Character
Greed and Corruption
Marriage, Adoption, and Family
Education vs. Real-World Experience
Misfits and Outcasts
Summary
Analysis
Mortimer, Eugene, and Roger all wonder what could have happened to Gaffer and whether he may have jumped overboard. Roger suggests that they should arrest Lizzie instead, and Mortimer and Eugene get angry with him. Mortimer, Eugene, Roger, and the Inspector all go to see Gaffer’s boat. They realize something heavy is tied to the boat and holding it in place. When they pull it up from the river, it’s Gaffer’s body.
Roger’s suggestion to arrest the totally innocent Lizzie shows how far he is willing to bend justice in order to get the reward money. Gaffer’s death highlights the harshness of life by the river, with Gaffer dying due to the same force of nature that had sustained him for so many years. Gaffer’s death in the water shows that despite Gaffer’s advice earlier for Lizzie to be grateful to the river, the river doesn’t return the favor.
Themes
The Inspector outlines a scenario where Gaffer got tangled in his own rope and got into a position where struggling in the river only made it worse. The Inspector prepares to break the news to Lizzie. Mortimer goes back home in a daze and immediately goes to sleep. When he wakes late in the afternoon and stops by Eugene’s to check on him, he finds that Eugene never went to bed. Instead, Eugene just took a walk, feeling as if he had committed a serious crime.
Gaffer getting tangled in his own rope shows how little control he actually had over the river, despite his beliefs otherwise. Eugene’s long walk after hearing this news resembles the punishment of the Biblical figure Cain, who was punished for killing his brother Abel by being forced to walk the earth, showing that Eugene feels he deserves a similar punishment for his involvement. (The Cain and Abel story is referenced again in Part 4, Chapter 7’s subtitle, “Better Cain Than Abel.”)
Themes
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