The Shipping News

The Shipping News

by

Annie Proulx

Jack Buggit Character Analysis

Jack Buggit is the owner of the Gammy Bird and Quoyle’s employer after he moves to the island. With Mrs. Buggit, he had two sons, Jesson and Dennis. Jack grew up on Gaze Island as a neighbor of Billy Pretty; both came to Newfoundland after the Canadian government moved the Gaze Island residents to Newfoundland in 1960. Government regulations made it difficult for Jack to make a living fishing, so he tried a variety of trades before settling on running a newspaper. He runs the paper in a decidedly non-traditional way, but it is very successful under his leadership. Jack calls into work claiming illnesses so he can go out fishing and sealing. He is superstitious about the sea and has a sixth sense for when people are in trouble: local gossip says he intuited his son Jesson’s death, he miraculously rescued Dennis when the Polar Grinder foundered, and he pulled Quoyle from the icy waters of the bay when Quoyle’s little boat sank. Jack is a man of strong opinions who has a preternatural ability to assign his newspapermen to beats that force them to confront their own fears and traumas, yet they all come out stronger and better for it. When Jack goes lobster fishing, he falls overboard and becomes caught in his lobster pot lines. He is pulled from the water by the Coast Guard and declared dead, only to revive from suspended animation in the middle of his own wake.

Jack Buggit Quotes in The Shipping News

The The Shipping News quotes below are all either spoken by Jack Buggit or refer to Jack Buggit . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Love and Family Theme Icon
).
Chapter 7: The Gammy Bird Quotes

“Yes. Incredible protection from plagiarism. Every sentence so richly freighted with typographical errors that the original authors would not recognize their own stories. Let me give you some examples.”

[…]

Tert Card scratched his head and looked at his fingernails. “After all, it’s only a stolen fiction in the first place,” he said.

“You think it amusing now, Quoyle, you smile,” said Nutbeem, “although you try to smile behind your hand, but wait until he works his damage on you. I read these samples to you so you know what lies ahead. ‘Plywood’ will become ‘playwool,’ ‘fisherman’ will become ‘figbun,’ ‘Hibernia’ become ‘hernia.’ This is the man to whom Jack Buggit entrusts our prose. No doubt you are asking yourself ‘Why?’ as I have many dark and sleepless nights. Jack says Card’s typos give humor to the paper. He says they’re better than a crossword puzzle.”

Related Characters: B. Beaufield Nutbeem (speaker), Tert Card (speaker), Quoyle , Jack Buggit
Page Number: 59
Explanation and Analysis:

“Now, what I want you to do. I want you cover local car wrecks, write the story, take pictures. We run a front-page photo of a car wreck every week, whether we have a wreck or not. […]

“And the shipping news. Get it from the harbormaster. What ships come into Killick-Claw, what ones goes out. There’s more every year. I got a hunch about this. We’re going to play it by ear. See what you can do.”

“Like I said on the phone,” said Quoyle, “I haven’t had much experience with ships.” Car wrecks! Stunned with the probabilities of blood and dying people.

“Well, you can tell your readers that or work like hell to learn something. Boats is in your family blood. You work on it. And fill in where Tert Card tells you.”

Related Characters: Quoyle (speaker), Jack Buggit (speaker), Petal Bear , Tert Card, Ed Punch
Page Number: 69
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9: The Mooring Hitch Quotes

“The way Jack carried on. Shocking. Thought if Dennis was a carpenter he’d be safe ashore. He was afraid, you see, afraid for him. And what we fear we often rage against. And Jack was right. See, he knows the sea has its mark on all Buggits.

“In due course, we had one of our winter storms. As the bad luck would have it the Polar Grinder as caught out. About two hundred miles east of St. John’s. February storm, savage as they come. Cold, forty-foot seas, hurricane-force wind roaring at fifty knots. Have you been at sea in a storm, Mr. Quoyle?”

“No,” said Quoyle. “And don’t want to be.”

“It never leaves you. You never hear the wind after that without you remember that banshee moa, remember the watery mountains, crests torn into foam, the poor ship groaning.”

Related Characters: Quoyle (speaker), Diddy Shovel (speaker), Jack Buggit , Dennis Buggit , Jesson Buggit
Page Number: 83
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 17: The Shipping News Quotes

“All right, then,” said Buggit, “This is what it is. This little piece you’ve wrote and hung off the end of the shipping news—”

“I thought it’d perk the shipping news up a little bit, Mr. Buggit,” said Quoyle. An unusual boat in the harbor and—”

“‘Jack,’” said Buggit.

“I don’t have to write another one. I just thought—.” Reporter Licks Editor’s Boot.

“You sound like you’re fishing with a holed net, shy most of your shingles standin’ there hemming and hawing away.” Glared at Quoyle who slouched and put his hand over his chin.

“Got four phone calls last night about that Hitler boat. People enjoyed it. […] Course you don’t know nothin’ about boats, but that’s entertaining, too. So go ahead with it. That’s the kind of stuff I want. From now on I want you to write a column, see? The Shipping News.”

Related Characters: Quoyle (speaker), Jack Buggit (speaker), Tert Card, Guy Quoyle , Ed Punch
Page Number: 143
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 25: Oil  Quotes

Quoyle was incensed, some well of anger like a dome of oil beneath innocuous sand, tapped and gushing.

“This is a column,” bellowed Quoyle. “You can’t change somebody’s column, for Christ’s sake, because you don’t like it! Jack asked me to write a column about boats and shipping. That means my opinion and description as I see it. This”—he shook the paper against the slab cheeks—“isn’t what I wrote, isn’t my opinion, isn’t what I see.”

“As long as I’m the managing editor,” said Tert Card, rattling like pebbles in a can, “I’ve the right to change anything I don’t think fit to run in the Gammy Bird. And if you don’t think so, I advise you to check it with Jack Buggit.” Ducked under Quoyle’s raised arms.

And ran for the door.

Related Characters: Quoyle (speaker), Tert Card (speaker), Jack Buggit , Ed Punch
Page Number: 203
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 26: Deadman Quotes

Everything in the house tatted and doilied in the great art of the place, designs of lace waves and floe ice, whelk shells and sea wrack, the curve of lobster feelers, the round knot of cod-eye, the bristled commas of shrimp and fissured sea caves, white snow on black roc, pinwheeled gulls, the slant of silver rain. Hard, tortured knots encased picture frames of ancestors and anchors, the Bible was fitted with sheets of ebbing foam, the clock’s face peered out like a bride’s from a wreath of worked wildflowers. The knobs of the kitchen dresser sported tassels like a stripper in a bawd house, the kettle handle knitted over in snake-ribs, the easy chairs wore archipelagoes of thread and twine flung over the reefs of arms and backs.

Related Characters: Quoyle , Wavey Prowse , Jack Buggit , Beety Buggit, Mrs. Buggit, Jesson Buggit
Related Symbols: Knots
Page Number: 213
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 27: Newsroom  Quotes

“I get to cover the wretched sexual assaults. And with each one I relive my own childhood. I was assaulted at school for three years […] To this day I cannot sleep without wrapping up like a mummy in five or six blankets. And what I don’t know is if Jack understands what he’s doing, if the pain is supposed to ease and dull through repetitive confrontation, or if it just persists, as fresh as on the day of the first personal event. I’d say it persists.”

“Doesn’t he do the same thing to himself? Going out on the sea that claimed his father and grandfather, two brothers, the oldest son and nearly got the younger? It dulls it, the pain I mean. It dulls it because you see your condition is not unique, that other people suffer as you suffer. There must be some kind of truth in the old saying, misery loves company.”

Related Characters: Quoyle (speaker), B. Beaufield Nutbeem (speaker), Petal Bear , Jack Buggit , Dennis Buggit , Jesson Buggit
Page Number: 221
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 35: The Day’s Work  Quotes

“What do you think, get a new slant on the home page? Can call it ‘Lifestyles.’ See, Billy and me been knocking this ’round or a couple of years. There’s two ways of living here now. There’s the old way, look out for your family, die where you was born, fish, cut your wood, keep a garden, make do with what you got. Then there’s the new way. […] Go off to look for work. And some has a hard time of it. Quoyle, we all know that Gammy Bird is famous for its birdhouse plans and good recipes, but that’s not enough. Now we got to deal with Crock-Pots and consumer ratings, asphalt driveways, lotteries, fried chicken franchises, Mint Royales coffee at gourmet shops, all that stuff. Advice on getting along in distant cities. Billy thinks there’s enough to make the home section a two-page spread.”

Related Characters: Jack Buggit (speaker), Quoyle , Dennis Buggit , Beety Buggit, Billy Pretty , Tert Card
Page Number: 285-286
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 39: Shining Hubcaps  Quotes

Well, said Quoyle, they were children. Children should be protected from knowledge of death. And what about Bunny’s nightmares? Might get worse.

“But, m’dear, if they don’t know what death is how can they understand the deep part of life? The seasons and nature and creation—”

He didn’t want her to get going toward God and religion. As she sometimes did.

“Maybe,” said Wavey, “she has those nightmares because she’s afraid if she sleeps she won’t wake up—like Petal and Warren and her grandparents. Besides, if you look at the departed, you’ll never be troubled by the memory. It’s well-known.”

And so Quoyle agreed. And promised not to say that Jack was sleeping. And he would come along and get them all in the station wagon. In about fifteen minutes.

Related Characters: Quoyle (speaker), Wavey Prowse (speaker), Bunny Quoyle , Petal Bear , Jack Buggit , Billy Pretty , William Ankle, Guy Quoyle , Jesson Buggit, Herold Prowse
Page Number: 331-332
Explanation and Analysis:

Quoyle experienced moments in all colors, uttered brilliancies, paid attention to the rich sound of waves counting stones, he laughed and wept, noticed sunsets, heard music in rain, said I do. A row of shining hubcaps on sticks appeared in the front yard of the Burkes’ house. A wedding present from the bride’s father.

For if Jack Buggit could escape from a pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat’s blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in midocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of the hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.

Related Characters: Quoyle , Petal Bear , Wavey Prowse , Jack Buggit , Archie
Page Number: 336-37
Explanation and Analysis:
Get the entire The Shipping News LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Shipping News PDF

Jack Buggit Quotes in The Shipping News

The The Shipping News quotes below are all either spoken by Jack Buggit or refer to Jack Buggit . For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Love and Family Theme Icon
).
Chapter 7: The Gammy Bird Quotes

“Yes. Incredible protection from plagiarism. Every sentence so richly freighted with typographical errors that the original authors would not recognize their own stories. Let me give you some examples.”

[…]

Tert Card scratched his head and looked at his fingernails. “After all, it’s only a stolen fiction in the first place,” he said.

“You think it amusing now, Quoyle, you smile,” said Nutbeem, “although you try to smile behind your hand, but wait until he works his damage on you. I read these samples to you so you know what lies ahead. ‘Plywood’ will become ‘playwool,’ ‘fisherman’ will become ‘figbun,’ ‘Hibernia’ become ‘hernia.’ This is the man to whom Jack Buggit entrusts our prose. No doubt you are asking yourself ‘Why?’ as I have many dark and sleepless nights. Jack says Card’s typos give humor to the paper. He says they’re better than a crossword puzzle.”

Related Characters: B. Beaufield Nutbeem (speaker), Tert Card (speaker), Quoyle , Jack Buggit
Page Number: 59
Explanation and Analysis:

“Now, what I want you to do. I want you cover local car wrecks, write the story, take pictures. We run a front-page photo of a car wreck every week, whether we have a wreck or not. […]

“And the shipping news. Get it from the harbormaster. What ships come into Killick-Claw, what ones goes out. There’s more every year. I got a hunch about this. We’re going to play it by ear. See what you can do.”

“Like I said on the phone,” said Quoyle, “I haven’t had much experience with ships.” Car wrecks! Stunned with the probabilities of blood and dying people.

“Well, you can tell your readers that or work like hell to learn something. Boats is in your family blood. You work on it. And fill in where Tert Card tells you.”

Related Characters: Quoyle (speaker), Jack Buggit (speaker), Petal Bear , Tert Card, Ed Punch
Page Number: 69
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9: The Mooring Hitch Quotes

“The way Jack carried on. Shocking. Thought if Dennis was a carpenter he’d be safe ashore. He was afraid, you see, afraid for him. And what we fear we often rage against. And Jack was right. See, he knows the sea has its mark on all Buggits.

“In due course, we had one of our winter storms. As the bad luck would have it the Polar Grinder as caught out. About two hundred miles east of St. John’s. February storm, savage as they come. Cold, forty-foot seas, hurricane-force wind roaring at fifty knots. Have you been at sea in a storm, Mr. Quoyle?”

“No,” said Quoyle. “And don’t want to be.”

“It never leaves you. You never hear the wind after that without you remember that banshee moa, remember the watery mountains, crests torn into foam, the poor ship groaning.”

Related Characters: Quoyle (speaker), Diddy Shovel (speaker), Jack Buggit , Dennis Buggit , Jesson Buggit
Page Number: 83
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 17: The Shipping News Quotes

“All right, then,” said Buggit, “This is what it is. This little piece you’ve wrote and hung off the end of the shipping news—”

“I thought it’d perk the shipping news up a little bit, Mr. Buggit,” said Quoyle. An unusual boat in the harbor and—”

“‘Jack,’” said Buggit.

“I don’t have to write another one. I just thought—.” Reporter Licks Editor’s Boot.

“You sound like you’re fishing with a holed net, shy most of your shingles standin’ there hemming and hawing away.” Glared at Quoyle who slouched and put his hand over his chin.

“Got four phone calls last night about that Hitler boat. People enjoyed it. […] Course you don’t know nothin’ about boats, but that’s entertaining, too. So go ahead with it. That’s the kind of stuff I want. From now on I want you to write a column, see? The Shipping News.”

Related Characters: Quoyle (speaker), Jack Buggit (speaker), Tert Card, Guy Quoyle , Ed Punch
Page Number: 143
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 25: Oil  Quotes

Quoyle was incensed, some well of anger like a dome of oil beneath innocuous sand, tapped and gushing.

“This is a column,” bellowed Quoyle. “You can’t change somebody’s column, for Christ’s sake, because you don’t like it! Jack asked me to write a column about boats and shipping. That means my opinion and description as I see it. This”—he shook the paper against the slab cheeks—“isn’t what I wrote, isn’t my opinion, isn’t what I see.”

“As long as I’m the managing editor,” said Tert Card, rattling like pebbles in a can, “I’ve the right to change anything I don’t think fit to run in the Gammy Bird. And if you don’t think so, I advise you to check it with Jack Buggit.” Ducked under Quoyle’s raised arms.

And ran for the door.

Related Characters: Quoyle (speaker), Tert Card (speaker), Jack Buggit , Ed Punch
Page Number: 203
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 26: Deadman Quotes

Everything in the house tatted and doilied in the great art of the place, designs of lace waves and floe ice, whelk shells and sea wrack, the curve of lobster feelers, the round knot of cod-eye, the bristled commas of shrimp and fissured sea caves, white snow on black roc, pinwheeled gulls, the slant of silver rain. Hard, tortured knots encased picture frames of ancestors and anchors, the Bible was fitted with sheets of ebbing foam, the clock’s face peered out like a bride’s from a wreath of worked wildflowers. The knobs of the kitchen dresser sported tassels like a stripper in a bawd house, the kettle handle knitted over in snake-ribs, the easy chairs wore archipelagoes of thread and twine flung over the reefs of arms and backs.

Related Characters: Quoyle , Wavey Prowse , Jack Buggit , Beety Buggit, Mrs. Buggit, Jesson Buggit
Related Symbols: Knots
Page Number: 213
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 27: Newsroom  Quotes

“I get to cover the wretched sexual assaults. And with each one I relive my own childhood. I was assaulted at school for three years […] To this day I cannot sleep without wrapping up like a mummy in five or six blankets. And what I don’t know is if Jack understands what he’s doing, if the pain is supposed to ease and dull through repetitive confrontation, or if it just persists, as fresh as on the day of the first personal event. I’d say it persists.”

“Doesn’t he do the same thing to himself? Going out on the sea that claimed his father and grandfather, two brothers, the oldest son and nearly got the younger? It dulls it, the pain I mean. It dulls it because you see your condition is not unique, that other people suffer as you suffer. There must be some kind of truth in the old saying, misery loves company.”

Related Characters: Quoyle (speaker), B. Beaufield Nutbeem (speaker), Petal Bear , Jack Buggit , Dennis Buggit , Jesson Buggit
Page Number: 221
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 35: The Day’s Work  Quotes

“What do you think, get a new slant on the home page? Can call it ‘Lifestyles.’ See, Billy and me been knocking this ’round or a couple of years. There’s two ways of living here now. There’s the old way, look out for your family, die where you was born, fish, cut your wood, keep a garden, make do with what you got. Then there’s the new way. […] Go off to look for work. And some has a hard time of it. Quoyle, we all know that Gammy Bird is famous for its birdhouse plans and good recipes, but that’s not enough. Now we got to deal with Crock-Pots and consumer ratings, asphalt driveways, lotteries, fried chicken franchises, Mint Royales coffee at gourmet shops, all that stuff. Advice on getting along in distant cities. Billy thinks there’s enough to make the home section a two-page spread.”

Related Characters: Jack Buggit (speaker), Quoyle , Dennis Buggit , Beety Buggit, Billy Pretty , Tert Card
Page Number: 285-286
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 39: Shining Hubcaps  Quotes

Well, said Quoyle, they were children. Children should be protected from knowledge of death. And what about Bunny’s nightmares? Might get worse.

“But, m’dear, if they don’t know what death is how can they understand the deep part of life? The seasons and nature and creation—”

He didn’t want her to get going toward God and religion. As she sometimes did.

“Maybe,” said Wavey, “she has those nightmares because she’s afraid if she sleeps she won’t wake up—like Petal and Warren and her grandparents. Besides, if you look at the departed, you’ll never be troubled by the memory. It’s well-known.”

And so Quoyle agreed. And promised not to say that Jack was sleeping. And he would come along and get them all in the station wagon. In about fifteen minutes.

Related Characters: Quoyle (speaker), Wavey Prowse (speaker), Bunny Quoyle , Petal Bear , Jack Buggit , Billy Pretty , William Ankle, Guy Quoyle , Jesson Buggit, Herold Prowse
Page Number: 331-332
Explanation and Analysis:

Quoyle experienced moments in all colors, uttered brilliancies, paid attention to the rich sound of waves counting stones, he laughed and wept, noticed sunsets, heard music in rain, said I do. A row of shining hubcaps on sticks appeared in the front yard of the Burkes’ house. A wedding present from the bride’s father.

For if Jack Buggit could escape from a pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat’s blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in midocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of the hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery.

Related Characters: Quoyle , Petal Bear , Wavey Prowse , Jack Buggit , Archie
Page Number: 336-37
Explanation and Analysis: