46 pages • 1 hour read
The Goldfinch
A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 5, Chapters 11-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 5
Part 5, Chapter 11 Summary: “The Gentleman’s Canal”
Boris gives Theo a ticket to Amsterdam and instructs him to get as much cash as he can. The plan is to get the painting back from those who stole it by giving part of the original sum requested and writing them a bank draft for the rest. Theo gets $16,000 in cash and leaves a necklace, book, and note for Pippa, saying, “Safe trip. I love you. No kidding” (645). He goes to the airport. He and Boris take separate flights and meet up in Amsterdam with Guyuri, Boris’s driver.
The plan is to set up a meeting with Sascha’s men, who have the painting, and Theo will pose as an art dealer named Farruco Frantisek. Theo, Boris, and Guyuri drive to meet Victor Cherry, an associate of Boris’s who has set up the meeting and will drive them there. They also meet a younger associate of Cherry’s, a man nicknamed Shirley Temple. They all drive to a café called the Purple Cow.
Inside, the men meet an older man and an Indonesian man. There is “some disturbance” because the third man has not shown up (664). Just as Theo hands over the bank draft, Cherry hits the older man with his pistol. Boris draws a gun on the younger Indonesian man, who identifies him as “Borya-from-Antwerp” (667). Theo catches sight of a young Asian boy in the kitchen.
Cherry comes out of the kitchen with the painting in a package. All of the men escape and drive off back to the garage. Boris insists that Cherry and Shirley Temple take the money in the briefcase for their trouble. Guyuri, Cherry, and Shirley drive off, leaving Boris and Theo in the garage. Boris and Theo lock their passports in the glove compartment.
Two older men, Martin and Frits, approach with the Asian boy from the restaurant. The older men work for Horst, and Boris concludes that Sascha must have called Horst after they took the painting. At first, Boris gives up the painting, then throws a cigarette at Martin. A gun fight ensues in which Boris hits Martin and Frits and is hit in the arm himself. Theo takes up the gun and kills Martin.
Theo and Boris leave in the car and head back to Theo’s hotel. Because they are stuck in traffic, Boris makes Theo get out and walk back in the cold. After wandering for hours, Theo finally finds his hotel and works on scrubbing the blood out of his clothing. He takes drugs Boris has given him and is able to zone out a little, moving in and out of “waking dreams” (693).
Part 5, Chapter 12 Summary: “The Rendezvous Point”
Theo continues to hide out in his hotel room as Christmas approaches, and he “lost track of time” (699). He is feeling ill after the day he spent wandering around looking for his hotel after the shooting. Additionally, he takes drugs that Boris gave him, which, along with his illness, induce hallucinations about Larry and Andy. He reads about the murder in the local Dutch papers and refrains from contacting Boris. However, after Theo texts “Where are you?”, his phone dies, and he does not have Boris’s number (704).
Theo decides that he will try to leave the country but realizes he left his passport in Guyuri’s car. He decides to go to Paris in an attempt to get a new passport. On Christmas Eve, he goes to the train station to purchase a ticket, but the agent will not sell him one without a passport. He contacts the American consulate and learns it will take at least ten days to be issued a new passport.
Theo returns to the hotel and decides to kill himself, seeing no better option. He also reveals that he had previously overdosed in New York. He writes a letter to Kitsey and starts one to Hobie but stops, feeling he is not expressing himself the way he wishes. He vomits and goes to bed without carrying out his suicide plan.
At night, he dreams of his mother, and “[t]here was psychic reality to her, there was depth and information” (724). Just as she is about to speak, Theo wakes on Christmas day. He rejects his suicide plan and decides to “stand forward and take what was coming to me” by going to the police (726). Before doing so, he orders an elaborate breakfast, and Boris bursts into his room.
Boris returns Theo’s passport along with a bag of money. Over the past week, Boris called the art police and revealed that he knew the whereabouts of the painting. He receives a large reward, a great deal of which he delivers to Theo. When the police raid Sascha’s apartment, they find many other paintings, and it is “one of the great art recoveries of history” (741).
Theo accompanies Boris to his house in Antwerp, then returns to New York. He encounters Hobie, who has recently spoken to Lucius Reeve and learned about the extent of Theo’s wrongdoing.
Theo tells Hobie the whole story, after which Hobie shows Theo a picture of Welty when he was a young boy. In the photo is a reproduction of The Goldfinch, a very important art object in Welty’s life.
One year later, Theo reports that he has been traveling and buying back all the frauds in person. He is not beholden to his engagement to Kitsey but continues to see the Barbours. Pippa has written him a letter in which she admits her love for Theo but insists that they are too much alike and would not be good for each other.
Part 5, Chapters 11-12 Analysis
The motif of color continues to figure into these last chapters, pointing to seeds of truth. Color continues to hover around Pippa, who is more present in these scenes. When Theo spends time with her, he is reminded of the intensity of his love for her as compared to his love for Kitsey. He gives Pippa a honey-colored necklace, “just the shade of her eyes” (646). He leaves the necklace and the note in her boots: “Emerald City, green wellies, Ozma’s color” (645). These intense colors point to the intensity of Theo’s love for Pippa.
Moreover, color also points to Theo’s chaotic choices in Amsterdam. When Boris pulls out a gun, Theo describes it as “chrome silver, mercury black, with a smooth density that blackly distorted the space around it like a drop of motor oil in a glass of water” (656). The vivid blackness represents the ways in which the men will disrupt order by killing Martin and Frits. Furthermore, Tartt includes many descriptions of blood following the shooting. It gets all over Theo’s clothes and is a reminder of what he has done. He tries desperately to scrub it out in his hotel room: “[B]rown stains scalloped and splotched at the throat long after the water ran clean” (689). Here, this remaining pigmentation points to the way in which Theo has gone over to the side of chaos.
In these final chapters, Theo grapples with core themes of the novel. He engages a great deal with the dichotomy of loss and recovery both internally and externally. The Goldfinch painting itself has been an object that has moved in and out of his grasp. When he goes to Amsterdam, he once again recovers the painting. He notes that “I was different, but it wasn’t” (672). Here, he comments on the constancy of the object and on his own development. While Theo has gone through much trauma and changed as a result, The Goldfinch has also sustained trauma but remained a pure art object. In this way, Theo expounds on the nature of art, assigning it importance: “We were easily forgotten […] the painting would be remembered and mourned” (701). While people change and suffer, art remains constant and transcends.
Theo also loses a sense of self for a time. He considers killing himself, and “I saw, really saw, […] that the world and everything in it was intolerably and permanently fucked and nothing had ever been good or okay, unbearable claustrophobia of the soul” (715). He loses faith in the universe, saying that it is all chaos, and loses faith in his ability to cope. He finds the “[p]erfect, perfect joy of throwing it all away” (716). Here, he considers his only chance for happiness to be losing himself in death, since there is no order in the universe.
This also leads into the dichotomy of chaos and order. Even before he considers killing himself, Theo becomes more chaotic. He pretends to be another person during the deal, Farruco Frantisek. He calls the experience, “dress-up […] Pure make-believe” (656). In this way, he is playing with the concept of truth and reality. When Theo kills Martin, he fully embraces chaos, and “with Martin I’d crossed the border into a different country—one way, no return” (701). By taking a life, he imposes his own will onto the order of the universe.
By the end of the novel, however, Theo transcends the dichotomies of chaos/order and loss/recovery. Instead of deciding to occupy these black and white categories, he instead inhabits a middle space. While he admits that the world is, by nature, chaotic, he decides to live with joy. He appreciates the game for what it is worth and tries to seek out the things that bring him happiness.
Unlock all 46 pages of this Study GuidePlus, gain access to 8,800+ more expert-written Study Guides.
Including features:
Related Titles
By Donna Tartt
