The Shipping News

The Shipping News

by

Annie Proulx

Resilience and Survival Theme Analysis

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.
Resilience and Survival Theme Icon

Life on the northern coast of Newfoundland as depicted in The Shipping News is hard. Most people live in isolated communities squeezed between the sea and the wild, mountainous interior of the island; life on and near the sea is dangerous because of storms and shipwrecks. Regulation by the Canadian government has limited the traditional fishing industry without meaningfully improving the economic prospects of Newfoundlanders. And, as Nutbeem’s and Billy Pretty’s reporting suggests, sexual assault, domestic violence, and crime are rife. Yet, the book paints a picture of Newfoundlanders as a deeply resilient, creative, and kind-hearted people. And in doing so, it celebrates not just Newfoundland culture, but the culture of all groups trying to cling to traditional ways while also engaging with the modern world.

Agnis and Jack most thoroughly exemplify the kind of resilience the book suggests people need in the modern world. Agnis had to overcome first a painful childhood (during which she was sexually assaulted by her brother Guy) and then a traumatic move from Newfoundland to the United States after her father’s death. Yet, she made a place for herself in the world with her lover, Irene. Then she had to survive Irene’s death, a move back to the island, a changing business landscape, and the loss of the house on the Point. While each change and loss hurts, she never stops looking toward the future and doing the best she can in her circumstances. Similarly, Jack Buggit tries half a dozen careers before finding stability through fishing and running the Gammy Bird. Importantly, he fishes despite his awareness and fear of the sea’s dangers. Likewise, Quoyle’s personal growth throughout the novel focuses on his development of the resilience and creativity needed to survive in Newfoundland, perhaps most clearly exemplified when he uses his cooler as a life preserver after his boat sinks. The novel shows that the things a person must do to survive, especially in such a difficult landscape as Newfoundland, aren’t always pleasant (or legal). Quoyle’s ancestors, for instance, survived as wrackers—land-based pirates who lured ships into wrecking on the rocks and then pilfered their cargoes. But, the book suggests, survival itself is an accomplishment worth celebrating—and striving for.

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Resilience and Survival Quotes in The Shipping News

Below you will find the important quotes in The Shipping News related to the theme of Resilience and Survival.
Chapter 4: Cast Away Quotes

Later, some knew it as a place that bred malefic spirits. Spring starvation showed skully heads, knobbed joints beneath flesh. What desperate work to stay alive, to scrob and claw though hard times. The alchemist sea changed fishermen into wet bones, sent boats to drift among the cod, cast them on the landwash. She remembered the stories in old mouths: the father who shot his oldest children and himself that the rest might live on flour scrapings; sealers crouched on a floe awash from their weight until one leaped into the sea; storm journeys to fetch medicine—always the wrong thing and too late for the convulsing hangashore.

Related Characters: Agnis Hamm
Page Number: 33
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7: The Gammy Bird Quotes

“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 13: The Dutch Cringle Quotes

“Oh. Kay. Keep happiness in the fucking family. We were moored at Whate Crow Harbor north of Bar Harbor. That’s in Maine you know, in the United States. Way up the coast from Portland. Actually there are two Portlands, but the other is on the West Coast. Down below British Columbia. Well, Tough Baby sort of slipped her moorings at the height of this incredible storm. The sea absolutely went mad. You’ve seen how Tough Baby is built. Utterly massive. Utterly heavy. Utterly built for punishment. Well! She smashed seventeen boats to matchsticks. Seventeen.”

The woman leaned her head back and cawed.

“Didn’t stop there. You’ve seen she’s flat bottomed. […] After she absolutely made kindling out of White Crow’s finest afloat, the waves kept shoving her on the beach. […] In she’d come. Wham!”

“Wham!” said the woman. The bathrobe gaped. Quoyle saw bruises on the flesh above her knees.

Related Characters: Bayonet Melville (speaker), Silver Melville (speaker), Quoyle , Petal Bear , Billy Pretty , Guy Quoyle , Dick Quoyle , Herold Prowse
Page Number: 119-120
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 20: Gaze Island Quotes

“Quoyle’s Point got quite a few known stinkers and rocks. There’s the Tea Buns, a whole plateful of little scrapers half a fathom under the water, off to the north of the Comb. Right out the end of the point there’s the Komatik-Dog. You com in on it just right It looks for all the world like a big sled dog settin’ on the water, his head up, looking around. They used to say he was waiting for a wreck, that’d he’d come to lief and swim out and swallows up the poor drowning people.”

Bunny, thought Quoyle, never let her see that one.

Related Characters: Billy Pretty (speaker), Quoyle , Bunny Quoyle
Related Symbols: White Dog
Page Number: 161
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 26: Deadman Quotes

At last the end of the world, a wild place that seemed poised on the lip of the abyss. No human sign, nothing, no ship, no plane, no animal, no bird, no bobbing trap marker nor buoy. As though he stood alone on the planet. The immensity of sky roared at him and instinctively he raised his hands to keep it off. Translucent thirty-foot combers the color of bottles crashed onto stone, coursed bubbles into a churning lake of milk shot with cream. Even hundreds of feet above the sea the salt mist stung his eyes and beaded his face and jacket with fine droplets. Waves struck with the hollowed basso peculiar to ovens and mouseholes.

He began to work down the slant of rock. Wet and slippery. He went cautiously, excited by the violence, wondering what it would be like in a storm.

Related Characters: Quoyle
Page Number: 209
Explanation and Analysis:

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: