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The bar silver and the arms still lie, for all that I know, where Flint buried them; and certainly they shall lie there for me. Oxen and wain-ropes would not bring me back again to that accursed island; and the worst dreams that ever I have are when I hear the surf booming about its coasts, or start upright in bed, with the sharp voice of Captain Flint still ringing in my ears: ‘Pieces of eight! pieces of eight!’
These final lines of the novel summarize Jim’s feelings about his adventure. Ironically, one of the results of Jim’s treasure hunt is that he learns he does not actually want the treasure, and that he is happy to leave the silver buried on the island. Similarly, at the end of the novel, Jim also realizes that he does not truly want adventure. The negative tone with which he closes his account seems out of place, as in the end everything has worked out well for him: Jim is safely back home, his friends have survived, and he presumably possesses a fair share of the pirates’ loot as reward. Yet Jim calls the island “accursed,” and he is plagued by nightmares of treasure and Silver’s screeching parrot.
Jim’s continuing dreams signify that his adventure is still with him, for better or for worse, and that his experience with the pirates has had an indelible impact on his life. However, it also appears that the tragedies of the adventure—the greed and death—still trouble him. Though Captain Flint is long dead and buried, and Jim is back in the relative safety of the civilized world, he still feels the influence and temptation of the pirates’ underworld. Jim is having trouble adjusting to the upright, civilized world and the fact that it completely rejects the darker, more lawless world of the pirates. That a pirate literally has the last words in the novel (the parrot’s cry of “pieces of eight!”) shows that the pirates, and the life and values they represent, will always haunt Jim and the civilized world.
