Mr. Pip: Chapter 23 Summary & Analysis

After Mr. Watts’s story about Grace and the Queen of Sheba, Matilda followed him into the woods and asked if he had told her mother about his plan to escape the island. When he told her he hadn’t yet done so, she suspected that he didn’t intend to let Dolores in on the plan after all. Later, when the villagers woke up on the seventh morning of Mr. Watts’s story, the rebel soldiers were gone. Suddenly, “redskin” forces emerged from the jungle with the drunken rebel as their prisoner. When the lead officer asked the drunk to identify Pip—who he still believed was a rebel fugitive the village was hiding—the drunk pointed to the schoolhouse. The “redskins” then went into the building, shot Mr. Watts, dragged him outside, chopped him to bits with machetes, and fed him to the pigs.

Matilda and the villagers looked at the ground in disgust and horror. “Look up,” barked the “redskin” officer. “Who saw this?” he asked them. “I saw it, sir,” Daniel said, happy to have “beaten his classmates with the answer.” Two soldiers took him into the jungle. When it was silent again, Dolores stepped forward. “Sir. I saw your men chop up the white man. He was a good man. I am here as God’s witness.” The officer approached and hit her across the face, but again she said, “I will be God’s witness.” He fired shots in front of her feet. “Sir, I am God’s witness,” she said. She was then hauled away by a group of soldiers.

When the “redskin” officer discovered that Matilda was Dolores’s daughter, he had her taken to the huts, where a group of soldiers were raping her mother. Seeing her daughter, Dolores pleaded with the soldiers, begging them not to touch Matilda, eventually bargaining by telling them they could kill her as long as they didn’t rape the girl. The officer consented to this deal, holding Matilda back and standing with her while his men dragged Dolores over to where Mr. Watts had been killed. They cut her up into pieces and fed her to the pigs. In this moment, Matilda saw “how sick [the officer] was with malaria. How sick of everything he was. How sick of being a human being.”

In retrospect, Matilda wonders how things could have gone differently. If her mother hadn’t spoken out, perhaps they both could have survived. But she also remembers what Mr. Watts taught her about “what it is to be a gentleman” and a moral person. She notes that Mr. Watts told her a moral person never ceases to be moral. “My brave mum had known this when she stepped forward to proclaim herself God’s witness to the cold-blooded butchery of her old enemy, Mr. Watts,” she writes.