The Innocents Abroad · Chapter
XXXIV explained
The narrator recounts his disillusioning experiences with Turkish culture, including a disappointing Turkish lunch, a fraudulent Turkish bath, and the narghile.
What happens
The narrator recounts his disillusioning experiences with Turkish culture, including a disappointing Turkish lunch, a fraudulent Turkish bath, and the narghile. He satirizes the slave-girl market in Constantinople, the lack of commercial morals, and the suppression of newspapers under the Sultan. The chapter contrasts romanticized Orientalist expectations with grim realities.
Themes in this chapter
Satire of Tourism
The narrator mocks the romanticized expectations of Turkish baths and lunches promoted by travel books, contrasting them with squalid reality.
Colonialism and Otherness
The chapter exoticizes and criticizes Ottoman customs (slave market, morals, press suppression) from a Western perspective.
Religion and Hypocrisy
The narrator notes that Greeks, Turks, and Armenians attend church but lie and cheat, highlighting hypocrisy.
Characters to notice
- The Narrator
Describes his disappointment with Turkish lunch, bath, and narghile; reflects on Orientalist travel books.
- Jack
Repeatedly says 'I pass' during the unsanitary Turkish lunch, refusing to eat.
Key passages
“When I think how I have been swindled by books of Oriental travel, I want a tourist for breakfast.”
The narrator feels so deceived by romanticized travel books that he could eat a tourist in anger.
Expresses the theme of disillusionment with Orientalist expectations.
“The reality is no more like it than the Five Points are like the Garden of Eden.”
The actual Turkish bath is as different from the description as a slum is from paradise.
Hyperbolic contrast between ideal and reality.
“Everybody lies and cheats—everybody who is in business, at any rate.”
In Constantinople, all businessmen are dishonest as a matter of course.
Critique of commercial morality in the Ottoman Empire.