Outlander Book Club: Voyager Chapter 25 breakdown

Foreshadowing in the Outlander chapter

There are two moments that stand out for me in this chapter as foreshadowing. The first connects with a few chapters down the line in Voyager.

Claire is trying to figure out what Jamie is hiding. It’s the fact that he’s smuggling, but Claire does question whether he’s a bigamist. Jamie stiffens to that, but to Claire, it seems like he’s stiffening because he’s going to tell her the secret.

However, we know that he stiffened to Claire bringing up bigamy. Jamie has, in fact, committed bigamy, albeit by accident. We’ll get to find out more about that in Voyager, and it will have a knock-on effect for future books.

There’s also a mention of glaucoma linked to Jamie’s eyesight. Claire is only joking, but I do wonder if it was some foreshadowing for Drums of Autumn. Jocasta MacKenzie Cameron has lost her eyesight due to glaucoma. This is a disease that can run in the family, too.

Adapting the Outlander chapter

Most of this chapter was used, but some of it was adapted slightly differently. The moments in the room in the brothel were pretty much the same. The two re-consummate their relationship and Claire finds out what Jamie is up to now. She finds out about the smuggling, finally connecting all the pieces.

There were moments that connected back to the wedding. In fact, “A. Malcolm” had a lot of callbacks to “The Wedding,” while also staying mostly true to the chapter.

The big difference was missing out the discussion about Brianna. I’d say there simply wasn’t the time to include it in. We can also imagine something like that happening off-screen.

One of the biggest changes was Mr. Willougby’s introduction. In the books, I’ve always felt like Yi Tien Cho was a caricature of a Chinese man of the time. It’s always felt uncomfortable and odd, and not because of the way that people of different races were treated. It just didn’t feel genuine and his parts in the story always tended to take me out of the overall book.

In the show, Claire is extremely respectful to Mr. Willoughby. For one, she chooses to call him by his Chinese name. Jamie doesn’t explain why he changed it. I do think that part is necessary and should have been left in the show. When I first watched Outlander Season 3, Episode 6, I rolled my eyes at the idea of Jamie changing someone else’s name.

He’d changed Fergus’s name in France all because he didn’t think Claudel was a good Scottish name. It felt like another case of that, and part of me was annoyed at Jamie for that. Had that line about the name sounding like a bad Gaelic word if said slightly wrong been left in, I could have accepted it a little more.

However, it felt like this way of forcing a British-sounding name on someone of a different culture and race. It was disrespectful, and I was so happy that Claire chose to call him by his own name.

The overall use of Yi Tien Cho felt so much better on the show than in the books to me, though.

What did you think when reading Voyager Chapter 25? Let us know in the comments below.

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