Honolulu provides the setting for a shore-side party whose progression from dinner to a movie leaves Willie Keith drunk, separated from the group, and unsure where he is or what time it is. The scene presents the city through the social outing rather than through description: its significance lies in the people who gather there and in the abrupt return to life aboard the Caine.

The Outing in Honolulu

During the visit, the party picked up a third nurse, assigned to Tom Keefer. At dinner in a Chinese restaurant, the blonde nurse showed an immediate liking for Roland Keefer, while Tom withdrew into long, drunken recitations from Paradise Lost and poems by T. S. Eliot and Gerard Manley Hopkins. Their different responses gave the evening a split rhythm: Roland and the nurse flirted boisterously, while Tom retreated into literary performance.

From Dinner to the Movie

Willie drank more than he had ever drunk before. The group then went to a Danny Kaye movie at CincPac, which Willie watched only as a blur, as though seen through a rainy window. He fell asleep in the middle of it and remained barely awake as he was led from place to place. The sequence turns a social excursion into an experience of mounting disconnection: the others move through the evening while Willie loses track of it.

The Return to the Caine

Willie’s awareness returns in a taxi with Tom. He asks where they are, what time it is, and where the others have gone; his mouth tastes of rum and Chinese food. Tom tells him they are on their way home to the Caine and that the party is over. Honolulu’s episode thus closes not with a description of the city but with Willie’s disorientation and the blunt transition from shore leave back to the ship.