The Shipping News

The Shipping News

by

Annie Proulx

Themes and Colors
Love and Family Theme Icon
Redemption, Courage, and Happiness Theme Icon
Life and Death Theme Icon
Resilience and Survival Theme Icon
Modernity Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Shipping News, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Life and Death Theme Icon

When their mother Petal dies, Quoyle tries to protect his daughters Bunny and Sunshine from that hard truth by using the euphemism that their mother is “sleeping” and can’t—or won’t—wake up. This confuses six-year-old Bunny, who points out that she herself wakes up from sleep. And as time passes, it becomes clear that this softened story of Petal’s death is intended to protect Quoyle as much as his daughters. When he moves to Newfoundland, he’s not yet ready to accept the permanence—and inescapability—of death. The book doesn’t criticize him for this reaction; indeed, it portrays numerous characters who remain stuck in their grief for dead loved ones, even if they died long ago. But the book does maintain that getting stuck in grief is unhealthy and prevents a person from living a fulfilled, meaningful life.

As Wavey reminds Quoyle just prior to Jack Buggit’s wake, death and loss are a part of life, just like the changing seasons. And a large part of the book focuses on Quoyle’s—and Bunny’s—slow realization and acceptance of this inescapable truth. Bunny’s nightmares testify to the trauma her mother’s sudden death caused her. So too does her fear over the ghostly white dog she sees haunting the house on Quoyle’s Point. It turns out that there’s a rational explanation for the dog, and a rational explanation for Jack’s evidently miraculous resurrection in the middle of his wake (plunging into the cold water of the bay triggered a coma; he was never actually dead). That is, the rational answer to Bunny’s fears is the truth, which Wavey gives to her in the aftermath of Jack’s resurrection. The resurrection of Jack—and, perhaps, of a dead bird Bunny found on the beach—suggest that understanding mortality doesn’t have to be a fearful experience, but rather that embracing the truth, no matter how difficult that truth might be, can help a person to feel more secure in themselves and in their place in the world. And in contrast, The Shipping News suggests that without embracing this truth, it’s all too easy to get stuck in grief, fear, and trauma.

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Life and Death Quotes in The Shipping News

Below you will find the important quotes in The Shipping News related to the theme of Life and Death.
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 15: The Upholstery Shop Quotes

“Yes of course I remember. […] There was another white dog adventure couple weeks ago. You know that little white stone I had on my garden rock? If you squinted at it it looked like a dog’s head? She come pounding on the door yelling her head off. I thought something terrible’d happened. Couldn’t get her to stop yelling and tell me what was the matter. At last she holds out her hand. There’s a tiny cut on one finger, tiny, about a quarter of an inch long. One drop of blood. I put a bandage on it and she calmed down. Wouldn’t say how she got the cut. But a couple days later she says to be that she threw away ‘the dog-face stone’ and it bit her. She says it was a dog bite on her finger.”

The aunt laughed to show it wasn’t anything to have a fit about.

Related Characters: Agnis Hamm (speaker), Quoyle , Bunny Quoyle , Wavey Prowse , Nolan Quoyle
Related Symbols: House, White Dog
Page Number: 133
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18: Lobster Pie Quotes

Quoyle made them sit side by side in the boat. They gripped the gunwales. The boat buzzed over the water. “Go fast, Dad,” yelled Sunshine. But Bunny looked at the foaming bow wave. There, in the snarl of froth, was a dog’s white face, glistering eyes and bubbled mouth. The wave surged and the dog rose with it; Bunny gripped the seat and howled. Quoyle threw the motor into neutral.

The boat wallowed in the water, no headway, slap of waves.

“I saw a dog in the water,” sobbed Bunny.

“There is no dog in the water,” said Quoyle. “Just air bubbles and foam and a little girl’s imagination. You know Bunny, that there cannot be a dog that lives in the water.”

[…]

“Well, it looked like a dog. The white dog, Dad. He’s mad at me. He wants to bite me. And make my blood drip out.”

Related Characters: Quoyle (speaker), Bunny Quoyle (speaker), Sunshine Quoyle (speaker)
Related Symbols: White Dog
Page Number: 150
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 24: Berry Picking  Quotes

His aroused senses imbued the far scene with enormous importance. The small figures against the vast rock with the sea beyond. All the complex wires of life were striped out and he could see the structure of life. Nothing but rock and sea, the tiny figures of humans and animals against them for a brief time.

The sharpness of his gaze pierced the past. He saw generations like migrating birds, the bay flecked with ghost sails, the deserted settlements vigorous again, and in the abyss nets spangled with scales. Saw the Quoyles rinsed of evil by the passage of time. He imagined the aunt buried and gone, himself old, Wavey stooped with age, his daughters in faraway lives, Herry still delighted by wooden dogs and colored threads, a grizzled Herry who would sleep in a north room at the top of the house or in the little room under the stairs.

Related Characters: Quoyle , Agnis Hamm , Bunny Quoyle , Sunshine Quoyle, Wavey Prowse , Herry Prowse
Page Number: 196
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 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: