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74 pages 2 hours read

Diana Gabaldon

Outlander

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1991

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Part 6, Chapter 34Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 34 Summary: “Dougal’s Story”

Claire and Murtagh befriend a band of gypsies, who promise to give them word if they come across a Scottish man of Jamie’s description. Two days later, one of the Romani men fetches Claire at the inn, claiming to have found Jamie. However, to Claire’s disappointment, it is Dougal they have found. Dougal informs Claire that Jamie is being held at Wentworth Prison and is condemned to hang. When Claire implores Dougal to help her free Jamie, Dougal refuses, claiming that Wentworth is a fortress from which no one can escape. Claire accuses Dougal of disloyalty after letting Geillis, with whom he was having an affair and has had a child, die. She also questions him about harming Jamie, but Dougal replies that Jamie is the closest thing he has ever had to a son. Dougal confesses to siring Hamish, at Colum’s behest.

Dougal admits his infatuation with Claire, then menacingly wonders out loud if he can impregnate Claire once Jamie is dead. Murtagh interrupts the conversation, advancing on Dougal with a loaded pistol and forcing Dougal to do as Claire says. Claire bargains with Dougal that if she can convince Dougal’s men to help her free Jamie from Wentworth Prison then Dougal will let her, and if she cannot, she will give Dougal back his horses and money. Dougal agrees. Five of the men decide to go with Claire to help Jamie.

Claire, Murtagh, and five of Dougal’s men set off for the Wentworth Prison 35 miles away. Dougal relays to Claire that Geillis is dead but that she wanted Claire to have two messages: The first is, “I think it is possible,” and the second is the number “1967.” Though Claire claims not to understand, Claire secretly knows that Geillis refers to the possibility of Claire’s successful marriage to and love for Jamie, and that 1967 refers to the year that Geillis traveled to the past from. Claire wonders that if she had seen Geillis’s vaccination scar earlier if she would have gone back to the stones and left Jamie.

Part 6, Chapter 34 Analysis

This section confirms Dougal’s complicated relationship to Claire when he refuses to help free Jamie from prison yet claims to love Jamie as a son. He also confesses to being infatuated with Claire and implies his ability to impregnate her if Jamie is dead. The section also touches upon the theme of the importance of family lineage when Dougal confesses to being Hamish’s birth father, performing the duty of having sex with Colum’s wife only for the sake of furthering the MacKenzie bloodline. He shows his cruelty when he casually informs Claire that Geillis, the woman with whom he had a child, is dead.

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