Out of Africa Book Four, Farewell to the Farm: From "Hard Times" to "The Death of Kinanjui" Summary & Analysis

The narrator feels pained. The whole world seems to be against her and finally she decides that she does not have the strength to stand up against it any longer. She does not want everyone to blame her for Kinanjui's death, which they will do if she takes him. She therefore tells him that she cannot and bids him good-bye. He dies later that night at the Mission hospital. The narrator attends his funeral. Farah is upset that the narrator had not taken Kinanjui with her, but they never discuss it.

Denys Finch-Hatton and the narrator rarely discuss her impending departure. As the farm had been Denys's home when not on safari, he has to find another place. He owns some land to the South on the coast and decides to fly down and visit it. He pledges to return that Thursday for lunch.

Denys does not appear on time for lunch, so the narrator heads to Nairobi for some errands, assuming that he was delayed in the bush. In the city, many people that she knows appear to be avoiding her. She has lunch with a British friend and at the end of the meal the friend tells her that Denys's plane had crashed outside of the city of Voi. He and his servant had been killed.

The narrator asks that Denys's body be sent to her farm, because Denys and she once had found a location in the Ngong Hills that they thought ideal for burial. On the day of the funeral, it rains, but many European and native friends come out for the service. The narrator later marks the grave with large stones and frequently visits it. Many of Denys's native friends appear on the farm and stay silently for several days in mourning.

Many years later after the narrator leaves Africa, the Lord Windchilsea, Denys's brother, plants an obelisk on his grave. The stone is inscribed with "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." After returning to Europe, she also learns from acquaintances that a lion and lioness have frequently been observed sitting together on Denys's grave, while watching the movement of game on the plains below. For the narrator, the presence of lions on Denys's grave is fitting and decorous.

Analysis

These chapters start the final section of Out of Africa and it is notably different from the rest of the book. Robert Woodrow Langbaum has compared the structure of Out of Africa to that of the five-part classical tragedies that Isak Dinesen admired. Out of Africa also has five parts, this one being the fifth. As Langbaum notes, the first four parts depict an "idyll," whereas the last part reveals the tragic "fall." The shift to tragedy almost immediately becomes evident with these chapters. Right away, the coffee harvest fails, grasshoppers plague, and Denys Finch-Hatton dies. The author must leave Africa. Dinesen may have metaphorically correlated Africa with a type of paradise previously in the book, but not any more. Not the tale has shifted to one of "paradise lost," which the narrator's eventual departure signifying her separation from the pastoral life.