52 pages • 1 hour read
Katherine PatersonJacob Have I Loved
Fiction | Novel | Middle Grade | Published in 1980A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Chapters 16-20Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 16 Summary
In the spring of 1945, just as the war in Europe ends, the Bradshaws celebrate the news that Caroline has been accepted to the Juilliard School of Music in New York on a full scholarship. Louise’s success on her high school graduation exams—she scores higher than anyone from Rass Island ever has—predictably takes second place. The end of the war also means that Call will soon be returning to the island. She begins putting lotion on her hands again.
Grandma becomes more disconnected from reality, obsessed with religious damnation, and verbally abusive to Susan. Both parents try their best to ignore the increasingly extreme behavior. After the news of the bomb in Hiroshima, Grandma is distracted by thoughts of Armageddon.
Truitt asks Louise what she plans to do next. Louise fears he is trying to get rid of her, and does not have an answer. Call returns and reveals that he has asked Caroline to marry him and she said yes. He plans to move to New York and go to college on the GI Bill while Caroline attends Juilliard. Once again abandoned, Louise escapes the conversation and returns to her work in the crab house.
Chapter 17 Summary
Call and Caroline marry the day before Christmas 1946 in New York. Truitt and Susan attend the wedding, leaving Louise at home to take care of Grandma. Louise invites the Captain to have Christmas dinner with them, so he will not be alone, and is miserable as she endures her grandmother’s childish behavior and the Captain’s “studied patience.” While alone, Grandma reveals to Louise that she had been in love with the Captain as a young girl, though he was much older than her, thus explaining her fixation on him now.
The Captain talks with Louise about how difficult her life has become. She admits that some part of her had perhaps hoped to marry Call, believing that would make things better, but the Captain says: “You were never meant to be a woman on this island. A man, perhaps. Never a woman” (216). He then asks what Louise really wants in life, to which she initially has no answer. After some consideration, Louise confesses that she wants to see the mountains and she wants to be a doctor, but she does not think she can leave her family.
Chapter 18 Summary
When Truitt and Susan return from New York, they look happy and in love. Grandma immediately starts insulting Susan again, shaming her for her happiness. But Susan never responds or objects to the abuse. Finally, Louise loses her temper with her mother and demands to know why a woman like her, who was pretty and college-educated, would come to a place like Rass Island to marry a crabber and put up with such foul treatment from her mother-in-law. Susan admits that she had a romantic notion of teaching poor children on the isolated island. Louise accuses her of throwing herself away when she could have had anything she wanted, but Susan insists that she does have everything she wanted. Louise refuses to be like her mother or her grandmother. She says she will not remain stuck on the island, and no one can stop her. Susan replies that she would never try to stop her, just like they never tried to stop Caroline. Louise retorts that everybody sacrifices their lives for Caroline’s “greatness.”
When Susan asks Louise what she wants from her, Louise demands: “let me go. Let me leave!” Susan responds that no one ever tried to stop her leaving and observes that Louise never voiced her desire to leave. Louise realizes this is true, that for all her dreams of escaping, she was also afraid to leave. Then Susan adds that both she and Truitt will miss her, even more than they miss Caroline.
Chapter 19 Summary
With renewed purpose, Louise moves to Baltimore and attends the University of Maryland. She applies to do a pre-med degree. However, her advisor tells her that she will never be accepted into medical school. She eventually transfers to the nursing program at the University of Kentucky where she specializes in midwifery.
When she graduates, she looks at a list of Appalachian communities requesting nurse-midwives and sees a small village called Truitt. She believes it is a sign that it shares her father’s name. The village is surrounded by mountains, as cut off from civilization as her island had been, and she feels immediately that she is in the right place. The community here is largely Polish and Catholic, and they are slow to accept outsiders like Louise. However, her work as a nurse and midwife is so important that they come to rely on her before long.
She meets a man named Joseph Wojtkiewicz, a widower with three children, when she comes to see his sick son. When she finishes treating the sick boy, Joseph invites her to sit in the kitchen and have a cup of coffee. Before long she finds herself telling him all about her life on Rass Island. By the end of the night, she realizes that she will marry him.
Chapter 20 Summary
Louise marries Joseph, and her parents show their approval by traveling from Rass Island to attend the wedding. Truitt dies soon after the ceremony. Caroline calls from New York to give her the news. By then, Louise is pregnant and cannot make the trip home for the funeral. Joseph goes in her place. Louise had thought that Joseph might bring her mother back with him, to live with them in the Appalachians. However, Caroline is performing in La Bohème and wants her mother there for the opening. Joseph returns from Truitt’s funeral just in time for the birth of their son.
Just days after giving birth, Louise returns to work when a young mother gives birth to twins. The first twin is a healthy boy, but the second twin is a girl who is small and barely breathing. Rushing to save the sickly twin, Louise takes her to the fireplace to warm her. Then, remembering the story of her birth, she tells the mother to nurse the boy so he will not be forgotten. Louise then nurses the smaller twin herself, as she is still producing milk for her own infant. Hours later, with both twins cared for, she walks home in the snow and hears a voice singing “I Wonder as I Wander,” just as Caroline had at the Christmas concert in 1941.
Chapters 16-20 Analysis
The events of Chapters 11-15 have knocked Louise down to her lowest point. However, in the aftermath she achieves some sense of acceptance and fulfillment by working with her father and reigniting her love for the water. Though she resents being abandoned by Caroline, Call, and the Captain, she also genuinely enjoys her time working on the crabbing boat. She also feels a sense of relief and release when Caroline receives a full scholarship to the Juilliard School of Music, thus ending further demands for sacrifice in the name of Caroline’s musical career.
Louise’s hope for the future, dampened by the events of Chapters 14 and 15, reawakens with the end of the war, not because of the war itself, but because this means that Call will soon return to the island. Still obsessed with her hands as a signifier of her fate, Louise begins again to use lotion and take care of her nails; though they “stubbornly refused to be softened” she is “determined not to give up on them this time” (196). While God, Louise believes, refuses to soften her heart, she commits to taking care of her hands as the first step in taking care of herself, even as her plans for the future are vague. She looks forward to Call’s return, thinking that he will work with her father and allow her to feel like she can leave, but she also contemplates marrying him to make life on the island more bearable. All these hopes are dashed when Call returns only long enough to inform her that he will marry Caroline and move to New York.
While her parents attend Caroline and Call’s wedding, the Captain advances Louise’s Search for Identity and Independence by directly confronting her with the question of what she wants to do with her life. Before she can complain about Caroline, the Captain adds: “Don’t tell me no one ever gave you a chance. You don’t need anything given to you. You can make your own chances. But first you have to know what you’re after, my dear” (217). The Captain thus challenges Louise’s perception of herself as doomed to give up everything for Caroline and asks her to take more responsibility for her happiness.
Louise’s inner turmoil over The Search for Identity and Independence, The Struggle With God in a Religious Society, and Sibling Rivalry and Its Emotional Impact comes to a head in the confrontation with her mother in Chapter 18. Susan’s evident surprise at Louise’s revelation of her unhappiness and her desire to leave Rass underlines the extent to which Louise has kept all of this to herself for most of the novel; the people around her have no idea of the roles that they are playing in her mind. Her parents may not have asked her what she wanted from life, as the Captain had in the previous chapter, but she has never expressed her desires either. Her mother’s admission that she will miss Louise even more than Caroline is perhaps not the apology for favoritism that Louise thinks she truly deserves, but it breaks open Louise’s life and allows her to move forward.
The final two chapters move quickly through Louise’s college education, adulthood, and eventual marriage. Some critics argue that these two chapters wrap up Louise’s life too quickly and neatly. However, they are important for the cyclical nature of the novel. The various ways the last two chapters echo earlier parts of the story help to bring the narrative full circle. Just as Louise cannot understand why an educated woman like her mother, who could have had anything, would come to tiny Rass Island, neither can Joseph understand why Louise would come to the tiny Appalachian village.
Louise bristles at Joseph’s comment that “God in heaven’s been raising you for this valley from the day you were born” (236). Louise has long since abandoned the idea that God has anything good planned for her, so Joseph’s comment—coming, as it does, from a practicing Catholic—disturbs her sense of herself. That she does come to love him almost immediately, “God, pope, three motherless children, unspellable surname and all” (237), demonstrates that Louise has made peace with many of her religious conflicts. By abandoning the narrative that she is someone whom God has decided, arbitrarily, to hate, Louise gains a large measure of independence and individual identity. By the end of the novel, she is strong enough to allow herself to remember Caroline’s rendition of “I Wonder as I Wander” without the rancor that had colored so much of her youth.
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By Katherine Paterson
