He participates in a duel against Belle Watling's brother, who is certain that Rhett is the father of his sister's unborn child.

Rhett, unable to see his friend getting whipped continuously and having no power to stop it, takes the boat to escape the chaos, and vows to grow up and never be helpless again.

The book only goes a short way past the timeline of Gone with the Wind (unlike the sequel Scarlett, which travels several years further).

[4] In The New York Times, Stephen Carter noted that the character of Rhett Butler was made into a more human, flawed person than either Mitchell or Ripley portrayed him to be.

However, he stated that the novel transformed Rhett from the man of mystery that drew readers to him into "a version of the angst-ridden, on-the-make, love-struck antihero of modern fiction: Rhett Butler as channeled by Rabbit Angstrom [of Rabbit, Run] or T. S. Garp [of The World According to Garp]."