Suttree watches a rescue team pull a dead body from the Tennessee River near his houseboat.

Suttree's uncle John tracks him down at the houseboat and urges him to rejoin the family.

Suttree is reunited with his childhood friend J-Bone at a Knoxville bar.

Harrogate is shot by farmers after being caught violating their watermelon patch at night.

Suttree's mother surprises him with a prison visit and he breaks down but refuses to sit with her.

J-Bone delivers the news that Suttree's son has died and Suttree travels to his wife's hometown.

Suttree watches his son's burial from a distance and fills in the grave himself with a spade.

Harrogate detonates a wall deep in Knoxville's underground tunnels and is buried in a surge of sewage.

Suttree becomes hopelessly lost in the mountain wilderness and wakes up stranded in Bryson City, North Carolina.

Suttree meets the Reese family fishing mussels on the river and follows them hours upstream to their camp.

A mudslide destroys the riverside camp and kills Wanda, ending Suttree's brief period of happiness.

Suttree meets a tourist named Joyce and they begin a passionate relationship, moving into a new apartment with new clothes and a car.

Suttree leaves Joyce after her escalating emotional breakdowns and returns to his lonely riverfront houseboat.

J-Bone discovers Suttree hemorrhaging alone in a hotel room with typhoid fever and rushes him to the hospital.

Suttree recovers from typhoid fever, says his goodbyes to Knoxville, and hitchhikes away toward an unknown future.

Suttree begins with a destitute fisherman living alone on a polluted Tennessee River, recently released from prison and cut off from his family. His fragile existence is shattered when he learns his young son has died, forcing a painful journey back to a family that despises him. He finds brief happiness upriver with a mussel-fishing family, only for a mudslide to kill the daughter he had grown close to. Back in Knoxville, Suttree falls into a consuming relationship with a woman named Joyce, which collapses under the weight of her emotional crises. A near-fatal bout of typhoid fever strips away everything—friends, home, and his old identity—pushing Suttree to finally choose life over stagnation. He hitchhikes out of Knoxville toward an unknown future, the only survivor of his world.

The headline arc of Suttree's life on the margins of Knoxville.

Suttree lies in his houseboat at night dreaming of his grandfather and brooding over his dead stillborn twin.

Harrogate is booked into prison, meets Suttree, and gets his first cigarette and first lesson in prison survival.

Suttree defends Harrogate in a brawl with inmate Slusser, resulting in Callahan being sent to the hole.

Suttree gets riotously drunk with J-Bone's group and wakes up sick and abandoned on a road outside the city.

Harrogate is released from prison and wanders Knoxville's poorest neighborhoods hunting for Suttree.

Harrogate finds Suttree's houseboat and wakes him from a nightmare, demanding help finding somewhere to live.

Suttree visits Aunt Martha, who feeds him and shows him old family photo albums depicting the living and the dead.

The old man who lives under the bridge asks Suttree to burn his body with coal oil if he ever finds him dead.

Harrogate chases down and kills a neighbor's pig and is forced to chop wood for the owner to avoid arrest.

Suttree helps Leonard row his long-dead father's decomposing body down the river and dump it in the water.

Reese takes Suttree to a brothel called the Green Room after failing to get a fair price for their pearls.

Blind Richard runs his fingers under a billiards table and discovers the name William Callahan inscribed in the tile.

Callahan is shot in the face during a bootlegging dispute and dies in the hospital five hours later with Suttree at his side.

The old ragpicker dies in the street while Suttree holds his hand, one of the few times a character does not die alone.

Suttree returns to his houseboat after his illness and finds a stranger's corpse decomposing inside his home.

This pool traces the quieter but significant events running alongside the main story, from Suttree's private grief over his stillborn twin to the slow erosion of his community. In prison, the seeds of his strange bond with Harrogate are planted through a fight and a shared sense of outcasts thrown together. Back in Knoxville, Suttree tends to the forgotten people around him—the old man under the bridge, the ragpicker, and friends like Leonard who drag him into increasingly grim situations. His friendships yield dark comedy and genuine warmth, from Harrogate's disastrous pig theft to Leonard's absurd scheme to conceal his father's corpse. The pool closes as Suttree returns from illness to find a stranger's body rotting in what was once his home, a final image of the life he must abandon.

The supporting cast and hidden moments that shape Suttree's world.

Harrogate steals Callahan's fermenting wine, gets blind drunk, vomits on a prison guard, and is put in solitary confinement.

Suttree is released from prison and immediately watches a badly beaten Harrogate being dragged back through the gates.

Suttree is picked up by police after being found drunk and gives a false name, spending the night in a city jail cell.

Harrogate tells Suttree that when he was ten years old he burned an old woman to death by setting fire to her house.

The town sheriff gives Suttree five dollars and a ride to the bus station on the condition that he never return.

Suttree buys strychnine for Harrogate to kill bats, but the hospital refuses to pay for bats that show no signs of rabies.

Harrogate shows Suttree his tunnel maps and declares his intention to blow his way into a bank vault beneath the city.

Miss Mother reads Ab Jones's palm but her figurines reveal something disturbing about Suttree, causing him to avoid her afterward.

Suttree receives a letter from his mother containing a $300 inheritance check and spends it on new clothes and a haircut.

Willard teaches Suttree how to fish for mussels and Suttree reveals he went to prison as the getaway driver in a pharmacy robbery.

Suttree and Wanda secretly begin sleeping together while the rest of her family is away from the riverside camp.

Joyce is arrested for sex work while away on a job and Suttree wires money to bail her out.

Harrogate is caught stealing coins from payphones and is transported to prison, marveling at the Tennessee countryside passing his window.

Suttree steals a police car while Ab Jones is being chased down and sinks the car in the river.

Delirious with typhoid fever, Suttree hallucinates his dead friends embracing him in a bar and wakes to find a priest praying at his bedside.

This pool focuses on the moments of discovery and consequence that quietly determine Suttree's fate. In prison, Harrogate's recklessness and Suttree's release mark a fork in their roads—a pattern of Harrogate failing upward into disaster that repeats throughout the novel. Key revelations emerge along the way: the truth of Suttree's original crime, Harrogate's chilling childhood confession, and the mystic Miss Mother's unsettling vision of Suttree's future. Schemes and relationships collapse one by one—Joyce's arrest, Harrogate's capture, the drowning of a police car—until Suttree is stripped of every companion and every distraction. His near-death fever vision of his dead friends is the final turning point, forcing him to recognize his own singular value and walk away from the life that was slowly killing him.