Chicago is presented not through the emigrants’ own arrival but through Fredrik’s story aboard the ship: a distant American city imagined as a place where unusual institutions flourish, and where a promise of high pay and sexual novelty gives way to physical ruin. The episode makes Chicago part of the emigrants’ uncertain knowledge of America, a place described by a traveler whose tale both titillates and unsettles its listeners.

Chicago in Fredrik’s Account

While telling the men about America, Fredrik describes a Chicago establishment where women paid men for sexual services, an inversion of the arrangement he says was familiar elsewhere. He recounts arriving there with a friend one April in search of work. They had spent the winter as lumberjacks, and, short of money and curious about the unfamiliar job, accepted positions offered by the manager in a saloon. Their account reaches the ship’s listeners as a report from experience, but the novel provides Chicago only through this embedded narration.

The women who came to the establishment wore masks, Fredrik says, so the workers did not know who their clients were. He describes them as including prominent married women whose husbands were away, women who were considered unattractive, and widows still accustomed to sexual companionship. His catalogue turns the city into a setting for a story about concealed identities and unmet desire, while remaining part of Fredrik’s own account rather than an independently verified description of Chicago.

Work, Cost, and Withdrawal

Fredrik says that the pay was high and the food plentiful: eggs, lamb chops, ham, and soup. Yet neither earnings nor rich meals compensated for what the job did to him and his friend. After weeks in the establishment they grew thin and weak; Fredrik describes their knees giving way and longer-serving workers as skeletal and permanently diminished. In his telling, the luxurious surroundings sharpen the contrast with the bodily cost of the work.

He and his friend left after six weeks and returned to the forest. Fredrik says he preferred the logging cabin to the establishment, although he also frames the work as a kind of service to women who needed it. His conclusion holds self-sacrifice beside self-preservation: even a good cause, he argues, cannot require a man to destroy his health. Chicago thus becomes the setting for his account of labor that is highly paid yet, as he presents it, ultimately unsustainable.

The Story’s Place Aboard the Ship

Fredrik’s account is shaped by its audience. The younger unmarried men listen with visible interest, and other passengers gather around him as he continues. His description of a ship full of available women excites the listeners’ secret desires; after his account of the Chicago establishment and its consequences, however, the circle falls silent. The change from eager attention to wordless response gives the anecdote its force without establishing whether the listeners accept every claim.

Chicago therefore belongs to the emigrants’ imagined America before it can become a place they know firsthand. In Fredrik’s story, the city promises novelty, employment, and pleasure, but the workers’ weakened bodies expose the price of that promise. The episode also makes the limits of the emigrants’ knowledge visible: the New World reaches them as a collection of narrated experiences, filtered through the speaker’s memories, judgments, and defense of his decision to leave the job.