The last chapter is the one the book was built for. Jonah goes east of the city, makes a shelter, and sits down to see what will happen to it. God appoints a plant to grow over him and give shade, and he is very glad of it; then God appoints a worm, which attacks the plant so that it withers, and a scorching east wind, and he asks again to die. God asks whether he does well to be angry about a plant, and Jonah says he does, angry enough to die. The book ends on the reply, which is a question and not a statement: you cared about a plant you did not grow and that came up overnight, and should I not care about a great city with a hundred and twenty thousand people who do not know their right hand from their left, and also many animals. There is no answer recorded, and the prophet is left sitting there.
Jewish practice reads the whole book aloud in the afternoon of the Day of Atonement, which places its argument about repentance and divine relenting at the point of maximum weight in the year. Christian reading has focused instead on the three days and three nights in the fish, which a gospel saying takes as the only sign that will be given, and early Christian funerary art used the sequence of Jonah being swallowed, cast up and resting under the plant as one of its most common images. The Qur'an refers to Yunus, also called the companion of the fish and the one of the whale, at several points, and preserves his cry from within the darkness, that there is no god but God and that he was among the wrongdoers, which remains one of the most widely recited supplications in Islamic devotion.