Why is Jarvis angry in book 2, chapter 7 of Cry, the Beloved Country?

After the trial for Arthur’s murder is over, James Jarvis goes to his son’s house, as presented in book 2, chapter 7 (or chapter 24). In Arthur’s study, although the father is not sure what he is looking for, he finds himself reading some papers that Arthur wrote. Among a wide variety of topics, one work especially catches his eye. In this essay, about “The Evolution of a South African,” Arthur recounts the intellectual and emotional aspects of his trying to come to terms with the complicated racial and national composition of his country. As the older Jarvis has not fundamentally questioned the social order, it surprises him to learn how much soul-searching his son had done about the ethical dimensions of the deeply divided system in which they live.

When James Jarvis reads what seems to be a critical comment about him and his wife, he grows angry at the perceived insult. Apparently rejecting Arthur’s opinion, he stops reading and starts to leave the house. This crucial passage states that Arthur believed his parents were “honorable” and had done a good job in raising him—except for the fact that he did not learn from them the depth of the country’s internal divisions. He laments what he considers his total ignorance about his country while he was growing up.

After he walks away, Jarvis reconsiders and sits down to read and digest the rest of the essay. He realizes that his son had become strongly committed to working toward meaningful reforms that he hoped would lead to equality and heal the racial divide.

How does Jarvis change in Chapter 24 of Cry, the Beloved Country?

The character of Jarvis is shown before Chapter 24 to be a character who is typically white and South African in terms of his prejudices against black South Africans and his view of what is wrong with South African society. However, in Chapter 24, he goes into his dead son's study and reads the document that his son was writing before he was killed, and realises something of how his son had changed his ideas and saw South Africa. His son wrote that he had learned "nothing at all" about South Africa from his parents, even though they did a good job in raising him. This lack of knowledge about his home causes him to devote his life to the service of South Africa. Note something of what he writes:

I shall no longer ask myself if this or that is expedient, but only if it is right. I shall do this, not because I am noble or unselfish, but because life slips away, and because I need for the rest of my journey a star that will not play false to me, a compass that will not lie. 

It is this declaration of his son's that has such a profound impact on Jarvis, and makes him see his own country with different eyes. In particular, it is this that makes him seek out the father of his son's killer and gives him the desire to want to help do what he can to change the sufferings of the black people in their villages through hiring a development worker and giving the children milk. Jarvis in this text is a man who is transformed through his son's death, and embraces a much more understanding and conciliatory attitude towards South Africa and its problems that he possessed before.