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.
Modernity Theme Icon

When Quoyle, Bunny, Sunshine, and Agnis move to Newfoundland, it seems as if they are stepping back in time. Their ancestral house on Quoyle’s Point has been standing there for at least a century and has been empty for the past 40 years. It doesn’t have modern conveniences like electricity or indoor plumbing. Agnis is determined to live there, even as it becomes more and more evident that neither she nor anyone else can. And in some ways, the book seems sympathetic toward her desire to look backwards, given the painful uncertainty of living in an era characterized by war, climate change, devastating illnesses like AIDS, and economic uncertainty. But The Shipping News complicates any easy assumption that the past was better than the present—or vice versa. For instance, Tert points out that 20th-century medicine and standards of living are much better than they were in previous eras. But there are tradeoffs, too, and modern life is in no way perfect. Despite technological advances, boats still founder and sink—as demonstrated by Dennis’s near-death  experience on the Polar Grinder. And modern shipping introduces hazards unheard of during previous sailing eras, like ecologically devastating oil spills. Instead, the book shows how life is difficult in any and every era, though the reasons for this change; and it suggests that the healthiest approach is to honestly reckon with the benefits and costs of modern life. It suggests that those who stay stuck in the past, like Nolan Quoyle, are doomed to obscurity and suffering. But so too are those who are desperate for the future to save them from their present, like Tert, who sees the ascendant oil industry as the way of the future despite the risks it poses to people and the environment. In the end, the happiest people in the book—and the examples the book offers readers—are those who strike a balance between honoring and remembering the past and living in the present.

Related Themes from Other Texts
Compare and contrast themes from other texts to this theme…
Get the entire The Shipping News LitChart as a printable PDF.
The Shipping News PDF

Modernity Quotes in The Shipping News

Below you will find the important quotes in The Shipping News related to the theme of Modernity.
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:
Chapter 25: Oil  Quotes

“I seen the cod and caplin go from millions of tons taken to two or three bucketsful. Seen fishing go from seasonal, inshore, small boats to the deep water year-round factory ships and draggers. Now the fish is all gone and the forests is cut down. Ruined and wrecked! No wonder there’s ghost here. It’s the dead pried out of their ground by bulldozers!”

The fish plant man got a word in. “They used to say, ‘A man’s set up in life if he’s got a pig, a punt and a potato patch.’ What do they say now? Every man for himself.”

“That’s right,” said Billy. “It’s chasing money and buying plastic speedboats and snowmobiles […] It’s hanging around the bars, it’s murders and stealing. It’s tearing off your clothes and pretending you’re loony. It used to be a happy life here. See, it was joyful. It was a joyful life.”

Related Characters: Billy Pretty (speaker), Quoyle , Tert Card
Page Number: 199-200
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 36: Straitjacket Quotes

“This guy sent an anonymous letter saying riots were necessary to purge the system and redistribute wealth and they didn’t print it. So he came down with a machine gun […] Quoyle, they shot at Mercalia on the freeway last week. Show you how crazy the scene is, I made a joke about living in California, about LA style. Fucking bullet holes through her windshield. Missed her by inches. She’s scared to death and I’m making jokes. It hit me after Edna called what a fucking miserable crazy place we’re in. There’s no place you can go no more without getting shot or burned or beat.”

Related Characters: Partridge (speaker), Quoyle , B. Beaufield Nutbeem, Bayonet Melville, Silver Melville, Ed Punch
Page Number: 290-291
Explanation and Analysis: