Summary
The pawn shop owner, named Maynard, sprays Butch and Marsellus with water, waking them up. They have both been bound and gagged in a basement dungeon below the pawn shop. The doorbell rings, and Maynard goes upstairs and returns with a man named Zed, who is wearing a security guard uniform. Both Maynard and Zed have Southern accents. Zed asks why the men look injured, and Maynard explains that he captured them as Butch was about to kill Marsellus. Zed tells Maynard to go wake up "the Gimp."
Maynard walks over to a trunk and opens it, where a man in a full-body bondage suit steps out, kneeling obediently on a hook beside Zed. Zed plays "Eenie Meenie Miney Mo," to decide which man will "go first," landing on Marsellus, whom he then drags away, still tied to the chair. While the Gimp watches Butch, Zed and Maynard disappear behind a closed door with Marsellus to rape him. Butch manages to break free of his arm restraints, and strikes the Gimp in the head, knocking him out. After removing his ball-gag, Butch runs upstairs and is about to leave, but has a crisis of conscience when he hears Marsellus's anguished cries rising up from the basement.
Looking around at the contents of the pawn shop, Butch first grabs a hammer, then a baseball bat, then a chainsaw, then finally a katana. Descending the basement again, Butch slowly pushes open the door, where he sees Zed raping Marsellus while Maynard watches. Butch slices Maynard's throat with the blade, then taunts Zed with the blade, holding it inches from his face. Now free and wielding a shotgun, Marsellus tells Butch to step aside, and shoots Zed in the crotch. Marsellus tells Butch that they can call a truce, under two conditions: first, that he does not tell anyone about the rape, and second, that he leaves town immediately and permanently.
Butch leaves, taking the keys to Zed's chopper motorcycle named Grace parked outside the pawn shop. Back at the motel, a frantic Butch tells Fabienne they need to leave immediately. Before she gets on the motorcycle, a distressed Fabienne begins to cry, telling Butch she thought he had been killed after he did not return. Butch comforts her, asking what she had for breakfast, and then the two ride off together.
A title card reads: "The Bonnie Situation." The film flashes back to the apartment where Jules and Vincent committed the film's first murders, only this time from the perspective of a panic-stricken man, who listens to Jules give his Ezekiel 25:17 speech while hiding with a gun in another room. After Jules and Vincent kill Brett, the panicked man runs out and fires wildly at them, but miraculously, all of his shots miss. Realizing they haven't been struck, Jules and Vincent summarily execute him. Jules calls their good fortune "divine intervention," and tries forcing Vincent to acknowledge it as such. The men then leave with the only man in the apartment they didn't kill, named Marvin.
In their car, a shaken Jules tells Vincent that he is retiring from all criminal activity, feeling that God has spoken to him. Vincent, who thinks there is a logical explanation for everything, turns around to ask Marvin his opinion, and accidentally shoots him in the face, sending blood flying all over them and the interior of the car. An irate Jules calls a friend named Jimmie in Toluca Lake and asks him if he and Vincent can use his garage for a couple hours so they can clean up the mess.
In the bathroom of Jimmie's house, Jules and Vincent wash the blood off their hands, and Jules excoriates Vincent for getting blood on Jimmie's towels. In the kitchen, Jimmie tells the men that his wife Bonnie will divorce him if she finds out he has helped them dispose of a dead body, and that she'll be home in 90 minutes. Jules frantically calls Marsellus for help, and Marsellus tells him that he will send over "The Wolf," which makes Jules immediately relieved.
Analysis
The sequence where Butch and Marsellus are kidnapped and raped by sociopathic Southerners is a direct reference to John Boorman's 1972 film Deliverance, adapted from James Dickey's novel of the same name. In that film, a group of men go on a canoeing trip in rural Georgia, where they are confronted with two murderous men who kill one of them and rape another. Deliverance was an early entry in an exploitation genre that became known in the 1970s as the "rape-and-revenge film," which featured violent and sensationalistic plots where a character survives and avenges a brutal rape. Other films like Sam Peckinpah's Straw Dogs (1971) and Wes Craven's The Last House on the Left (1972) also helped popularize the genre.
The intrusion of Zed and Maynard into the narrative forces Marsellus and Butch to form an uneasy truce against a common enemy, reversing the dynamic that has already informed many of the plot's previous events. Butch's decision to save Marsellus is a morally complex one, given that Marsellus ordered him to be executed less than 24 hours beforehand. The scene where Butch finds various weapons in the pawn shop—a hammer, a baseball bat, a chainsaw, and finally a katana—is at once a humorous reflection of the fact that the men are held captive underneath a pawn shop, and perhaps also a sly reference to violent video games, which often allow their players to "choose their weapons."
Zed playing "Eenie Meenie Miney Mo" to determine which man will be raped first is yet another occasion where fortune and chance dictate the film's events, rather than logic and reason. After Zed arrives, Maynard asks him if "Grace" will be okay upstairs, creating an expectation that a woman is waiting while the men are in the basement. Instead, Tarantino upends this assumption by revealing that Grace is actually Zed's chopper motorcycle, on which Butch triumphantly speeds away. In Pulp Fiction, surfaces and appearances are often forms of subterfuge (or, "fiction") that conceal the true substance (or, "pulp") that lies beneath.
Themes of fortune and divine intervention reach their apex when Jules and Vincent are miraculously unharmed by a hail of bullets. Jules insists to Vincent that they should recognize the event as an act of God, and is the only character who struggles to understand the philosophical implications of such incidents. In the meta-fictional world of the film, Tarantino's characters' debates over "acts of God," can also be interpreted as self-awareness that they are in fact fictional characters in a larger narrative, subject to events beyond their control. In this view, Tarantino becomes God, planning out the "script" according to which the lives of Jules, Vincent, and the others will play out. Jules and Vincent are debating precisely this matter when Vincent accidentally kills Marvin, another incidental moment of unpredictability and chance.
Throughout the film, Tarantino gives various clues and signals about the order in which the events of the film take place, so that the audience can piece together a timeline. For example, Tarantino references the aftermath of Marvin's murder early in the film, when Jules and Vincent enter Marsellus's bar wearing the "dorky" shirts that Jimmie gives them, rather than their trademark suits. Various characters mention breakfast—Jules eating Brett's Big Kahuna burger in the morning, Fabienne listing her favorite breakfast foods, Wolf asking Jimmie for coffee—so that viewers can align when exactly events are happening in parallel.
