Dengue fever

Dengue fever is a sudden bodily crisis in Joe Williams’s story: fever and intense joint pain leave him delirious, hospitalized, and unable to resume his journey for two months. The illness’s aftermath matters as much as its onset, keeping him in St. Thomas through July and shaping the isolation from which he eventually finds passage back to New York.

Onset and Hospitalization

A couple of days after Joe and Larry have been drinking rum ashore, Joe develops a fever and terrible pain in his joints. He is out of his head when he is put ashore at St. Thomas. The hospital orderly later tells him that he had been delirious for five days and that the staff had given up hope for him. The narrative identifies the disease as dengue and says he is sick for two months before he is strong enough even to write to Del and tell her where he is.

The account makes the hospital experience part of the illness’s social setting, not simply a record of symptoms. The doctors are described as angry because the hospital was for post patients; the narration adds the grotesque explanation that, since Joe was white and unconscious, they could not feed him to the sharks. The remark exposes the racialized assumptions surrounding his treatment while emphasizing how helpless he was during the worst days of the fever.

Convalescence in St. Thomas

By July, Joe can walk the town’s steep streets dusted with coral, but he has to leave the hospital and has nowhere secure to stay. A cook at the marina barracks looks out for him and finds him a place to sleep in an unused section of the building. His recovery is therefore neither a quick return to health nor a return to ordinary life: it begins with precarious shelter and the slow resumption of movement.

The heat, cloudless sky, bare hills, and enclosed blue harbor become the setting for his long convalescence. Joe spends hours in the shade of corrugated roofing on the old coal wharf, looking through its planks at shoals of snapper feeding among the piles. His thoughts circle among Del, the French girl in Bordeaux, the war, and the United Fruit Company’s exploitation of workers. Like the fish moving around the weeds, these thoughts recur without resolution; he sometimes falls asleep while watching them.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

When a northbound fruit steamer arrives, Joe tells an officer on the wharf his story and is given passage to New York. The illness has kept him away long enough for his attempted contact with Janey to fail: she is out west on business when he calls her office. Dengue thus interrupts his maritime route, separates him from people he hopes to reach, and returns him to a life whose next steps remain uncertain.

The episode gives a specific bodily duration to a novel whose multiple lives move beneath the larger pressures of history. Rather than appearing as a public headline, Joe’s illness unfolds through delirium, two months of weakness, improvised lodging, and hours spent watching fish from a wharf. Its consequences are practical and intimate: lost time, dependence on a stranger’s help, and a passage home made possible by another ship.