59 pages • 1 hour read
Edgar Rice BurroughsTarzan of the Apes
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1912A 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 11-16Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 11 Summary
After Tarzan returns from raiding the village, the ape leader Kerchak begins to grow jealous. Tarzan practices using his bow and arrow. He also figures out how to open a locked box in the cabin. Inside the box, he finds a photograph of his father, John Clayton. He also finds a book, but he cannot read the script or decipher its meaning because this book is John Clayton’s diary and is written in French. Tarzan returns to the African village to steal more arrows and finds cooking pots being brought out, along with other food being prepared.
He watches as the villagers return from hunting and realizes that their captured quarry is another human. The villagers drum and dance while they torture the prisoner in the same manner as the apes did during the Dum-Dum ritual. However, Tarzan is shocked by the cruelty of his own kind. The villagers practice cannibalism and prepare to eat the captured prisoner. Tarzan sneaks into one of the huts and hides from a woman who returns to find her cooking pot. Then, Tarzan climbs a tree and throws a human skull that he found in the village into the middle of the clearing, increasing the villagers’ superstitious fear. The people decide that they have offended a god and begin leaving Tarzan offerings of food and arrows to appease him. When Tarzan returns from the village, he is attacked by Sabor the lioness and manages to kill her with a poisoned arrow and a knife. He skins her pelt and returns to the apes to brag about his kill. Kerchak attacks Tarzan and Tarzan kills the ape leader, becoming the new king of the apes.
Chapter 12 Summary
Terkoz, the son of Tublat, continues to resent Tarzan’s new position as the leader, but he realizes that he cannot beat Tarzan in combat, so he waits to try to ambush him later. Meanwhile, Tarzan leads the apes to the fields around the African village and lets them steal some of the crops for food, but not enough that the villagers are motivated to leave the area entirely. The villagers grow increasingly afraid of the forest and start looking for another place to live. Tarzan leads the apes deeper into the jungle so that they are farther from the human settlement.
As a king, Tarzan quickly grows bored with mediating the disputes between the apes and longs to return to the cabin to read books. He finds the limited vocabulary of the apes to be boring and no longer has any family connections or loved ones with the apes. However, Tarzan worries that if he leaves, Terkoz will take over the ape group and become a brutal leader. One day, Tarzan catches Terkoz beating a female ape, and he and Terkoz begin to fight. This time, Tarzan has no weapon, so he is forced to rely on his strength and dexterity to prevail. While his human body is weaker than Terkoz’s, he uses reason to invent the “full-Nelson” wrestling maneuver. With both arms wrapped around Terkoz’s neck, Tarzan considers snapping it and killing the ape but realizes that it would be better to make an example of Terkoz’s submission. Terkoz surrenders, and Tarzan leaves the apes to go back to the beach, telling them to choose another ruler.
Chapter 13 Summary
Tarzan returns to the jungle and steals clothing from the villagers, killing them with his noose and taking their ornaments. He learns to shave his face because he believes that only apes are hairy. One of the villagers, Mirando, escapes from Tarzan and tells the others about how his companions were soundlessly lifted up into the trees. Hearing this tale, Mbango, the king, accuses Mirando of lying to hide that he fled from a predator animal that killed his friends. One day, Tarzan returns to the beach and sees a ship called the Arrow on the coast. A crew of villainous-looking sailors are fighting, and Tarzan sees one of them shoot his companion. He grows disenchanted with humans, realizing that they are no more “civilized” than the apes or lions of the jungle. He finds that these new humans have ransacked his cabin, and he grows so angry that the new scar on his forehead from his fight with Terkoz glows red. He writes a message in pencil and leaves it in the cabin. Then, Tarzan notices another group of humans: an elderly man in spectacles, a tall man in white, a fussy elderly man, a Black woman, and a white girl of 19. These people are being marooned on the island, and Tarzan overhears them discovering his written message when they enter the cabin. The message is a warning against harming the house or its contents and is signed by Tarzan of the Apes, and the people wonder who this might be. The old man with glasses is Professor Archimedes Q. Porter, and the girl is his daughter, Jane Porter. They are accompanied by Mr. William Cecil Clayton, an English lord who has inherited the title of Lord Greystroke after John Clayton’s disappearance. The other elderly man is Mr. Samuel T. Philander, the professor’s secretary, and the Black woman is the family’s servant, Esmerelda. Tarzan fires his bow from the woods and saves William Cecil Clayton from being shot by the sailors. William Cecil Clayton manages to steal one of the revolvers from the sailors and gives it to Jane to help protect her. Meanwhile, Professor Porter and Mr. Philander get lost in the jungle, and Clayton goes to search for them, leaving Jane and Esmerelda alone in the cabin. The women are upset by the skeletons, but Jane remains calm, and they resolve to wait.
Chapter 14 Summary
As William Clayton goes into the jungle and Professor Porter and Mr. Philander are lost on the coast, the mutinous sailors of the Arrow discuss their plans. Tarzan watches and finds that he instinctively likes Clayton, the old men, and the young girl. However, he finds that he dislikes the sailors and their leader, Snipes. Tarzan follows Clayton into the jungle and saves him from Sheeta, the leopard. Clayton also gets lost in the jungle, heading toward the village when he mistakenly believes that he is returning to the cabin. A lion attacks him, but Tarzan shoots it with an arrow and pulls Clayton up into the trees. Clayton is impressed by Tarzan’s powerful physique but discovers that Tarzan does not seem to speak any language. While Tarzan eats the lion’s meat raw, Clayton decides that this cannot be Tarzan because he assumes that someone who can write English must also know how to speak it. Distantly, Clayton hears a gun being fired. Meanwhile, back at the cabin, Jane and Esmerelda are being terrorized by a lioness. They try to barricade the windows, but Esmeralda keeps fainting from fear. Jane shoots the lioness and wounds her, but then faints. With no one left to brace the window, the lioness manages to break into the cabin.
Chapter 15 Summary
Tarzan takes Clayton swinging through the trees back to the cabin. They see the lioness trying to force her way into the cabin. Jane wakes up and considers shooting herself with the gun to avoid a painful death, but then she realizes that she should spare Esmeralda first because she is a beloved family servant. However, before she can fire the gun, the lioness is dragged back out of the window. Tarzan wrestles the lioness away and tries to tell Clayton to stab her with the poisoned arrows or knife, but Clayton is distracted by his worry for Jane, whom he loves. Tarzan instead puts the lioness into a full-Nelson and breaks her neck. Jane rushes out of the cabin, but Tarzan has already fled back into the jungle. Clayton explains that the strange man saved him, but that he neither speaks nor understands English. Esmerelda wakes up, shocked that she is not dead, and Jane laughs.
Chapter 16 Summary
To the south, Professor Porter and Mr. Philander are lost and are walking the wrong way down the beach. They debate historical questions concerning Islamic Spain, with the professor suggesting that Islam limited the people’s ability to make scientific progress. Philander notices that they are being pursued by a lion, but Professor Porter scolds him for getting distracted from their debate. Philander tries to run away, but Professor Porter says that it is unbecoming of scholars to be seen running. He tries to continue the academic conversation as Tarzan arrives and pulls the men up into the safety of the trees.
Philander scolds Professor Porter, and Porter snaps out of his academic mode for a moment, speaking in a rural southern accent as he threatens Philander back. Philander is overjoyed that the professor has remembered “how to be human” (86). The two old friends realize that someone must have pulled them both into the tree, and they soon hear Tarzan shrieking a warning to the lion in the language of the anthropoid apes. The two men fall out of the tree in shock, and Tarzan emerges from the tree to lead them back up the beach to the cabin. Professor Porter refuses to trust Tarzan’s guidance, so Tarzan lassos them both with a rope and forces them to follow him back to the cabin where the groups are reunited. Tarzan vanishes back to the forest, and Esmerelda wonders if he was an angel. The others state that given his tendency for eating raw meat, screaming his war cry, and tying up respectable gentlemen, his behavior is not what they would expect from an angel.
Chapters 11-16 Analysis
Once Tarzan has fully come of age, he quickly overcomes the remaining challenges to his authority in the jungle. However, he finds this “mastery” over animals and non-white people to be ultimately dissatisfying, necessitating his attempts to seek out the companionship of the new party of humans marooned on the beach. Because Tarzan implicitly believes these humans, most of whom are white, to be far more appealing, Burroughs’s racist ideals once again become apparent in the fabric of the narrative. While Tarzan’s initial reaction to the Porter family is favorable, he finds himself unable to integrate into this group as well, for the issues of his rough upbringing bring a new aspect of Nature Versus Nurture to the fore. Given his lack of knowledge about “civilized” behavior, he finds himself isolated from the group due to an insufficient knowledge of language and proper manners.
The beginning chapters of this section show Tarzan’s rise to power in the jungle, but reveal that authority without companionship is not enough to make him happy and fulfilled. Searching for worthy goals to add structure and sense to his life, Tarzan first conquers Kerchak, the leader of the apes, through the use of his knife, and this rudimentary technology renders him “master of far mightier muscles than his own” (58). Tarzan also begins to kill the African villagers with his rope and knife, leading him to dominate their society as a god and fill the villagers with “consternation and dread, for it was one thing to put food out to propitiate a god or a devil, but quite another thing to have the spirit really come into the village and eat it” (60). Thus, the legend of Tarzan takes on monumental proportions before he ever encounters the Porter family, and the theme of Hybrid Identity and Belonging almost becomes reversed, for at this point in the story, Tarzan is essentially alienating himself from all the social groups that surround him, be they human or ape.
This pattern of isolation continues as Tarzan grows bored with his position of authority in the jungle and therefore seeks out other white humans with which to associate, and this narrative shift emphasizes the author’s unspoken and biased suggestion that a white person, however unconventionally reared, can only find true kinship with other white people. This tendency occurs even before the Porters’ arrival, for he prefers the company of his father’s books over that of the other apes. The books provide the only intellectual stimulation that Tarzan can find in the jungle, as mediating the quarrels of the apes is both easy and dull work for him. Burroughs suggests that this dynamic indicates Tarzan’s growing maturity, for “a little child may find companionship in many strange and simple creatures, but to a grown man there must be some semblance of equality in intellect as the basis for agreeable association” (62). However, when Tarzan first encounters other white men, he is disappointed as he also perceives them to be “inferior.” The sailors from the Arrow are described as being “swarthy, sun-tanned, villainous looking fellows” (68) and Tarzan is discouraged by their rough behavior. While he initially wants to “rush forward and greet these white men as brothers,” (68), he realizes after seeing one sailor shoot another that “they were evidently no different from the black men—no more civilized than the apes—no less cruel than Sabor” (68). With this particular passage, Burroughs extends the hierarchy of civility to the white men as well as the animals and nearby African community, suggesting that even within the races, there are different levels of intelligence and worthiness. Yet even when comparing different groups of white men, it is also significant that Burroughs chooses to portray the “swarthy” group as the more “villainous,” and thus, the author’s act of judging characters’ level of virtue based upon their skin color continues unabated.
Tarzan’s first encounter with Jane Porter’s party changes his impression of other humans, suggesting that he is able to instinctively recognize them as suitable companions. When he observes the group debarking from the ship, the narration suggests that the “others of the party were of different stamp“ (69) than the sailors. After watching their interactions, Tarzan reflects that he is drawn to this party and “intuitively” prefers “the girl [for whom] he had a strange longing which he scarcely understood” (74). The narration also takes care to note, “As for the big [B]lack woman, she was evidently connected in some way to the girl, and so he liked her, also” (74). Tarzan’s sexual attraction to Jane makes him desire her company, while the Black woman, Esmerelda, who might otherwise be like his enemies, the African villagers, is made acceptable only through her service and loyalty to this white family. Tarzan’s motivation thus shifts from a need to dominate and conquer others to a need to find acceptance within this particular group. However, he is hindered by his inability to speak their language and by his ignorance of “civilized” manners. Despite the fact that he repeatedly saves Jane and her family from danger, they do not trust him because he cannot communicate with language and because he engages in seemingly “uncivilized” behaviors like eating raw meat.
