Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), Chapter 17 summary

What happens

1. The travelers stay at Streatley for two days and pay extra to clean clothes their own washing makes dirtier.
2. The narrator distinguishes fishing from catching fish and presents believable invention as the angler’s essential skill.
3. A conscientious fisherman gradually replaces modest exaggeration with a system that claims ten fish even when he catches none.
4. The narrator, George, and the dog visit an inn, where four visitors separately claim to catch its displayed trout.
5. The landlord laughs at their claims and offers his own account of catching the fish as a schoolboy.
6. George climbs a chair, accidentally brings down the case, and breaks the trout, exposing its plaster construction.

In this chapter

What to notice

The material disproves every claim to catching the displayed fish. It turns the competing accounts, including the landlord’s explanation, into exposed inventions.

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