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Summary
Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Shipping News, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Love and Family
Redemption, Courage, and Happiness
Life and Death
Resilience and Survival
Modernity
Summary
Analysis
At the age of 36, Quoyle is a large, unaccomplished, and deeply lonely man. Born in Brooklyn and raised in upstate New York, his appearance—his mountainous height and bulk, his enormous chin—have always set him apart. His childhood was marred by his brother Dick’s teasing; his father Guy’s disapproval; and his own struggles to succeed in the classroom, in social situations, and at work. By adulthood, Quoyle has only two friends: Partridge—a small, feisty Black man who works as a copyeditor at the local newspaper—and Partridge’s second wife, Mercalia. Partridge struck up a conversation with Quoyle one day at the laundromat and they’ve been friends since.
The first chapter establishes, in painful detail, exactly how out-of-place Quoyle feels in his life. This includes both his family—who reject him almost from the beginning—and the culture of late 20th century American life, with its emphasis on fitting in, financial success, and workplace performance. It’s telling that Quoyle’s friend Partridge is more interested in finding pleasure in friendship than in the grind of modern life—he and Quoyle want and need community.
Themes
Partridge also helped Quoyle get his on-again, off-again job at the Mockingburg Record. Quoyle isn’t very good at it. Partridge tries to help him develop an ear for what makes a good—attention-grabbing—story, but Quoyle never figures it out. Managing editor Ed Punch fires him each summer when the college-aged kids who work for the paper come back from school. Quoyle survives during those periods on a series of demeaning jobs, like cabdriver and car wash attendant. Still, each fall, Punch rehires him, because Quoyle’s quiet, needy attentiveness gets people to talk, and talk is good for crafting newspaper articles.
The workplace only seems to provide another place for Quoyle to fail. Ed Punch treats him as a charity case, but it’s also clear that he’s taking advantage of Quoyle’s attentive listening skills without praising or fairly compensating Quoyle for them. And although the book casts Quoyle’s attentiveness here in negative terms—as a sign of his neediness and desperation to be loved—it also points toward his capacity for love. He’s tuned to other people and only wants to find friendship and understanding.
Themes
Then, one night, Partridge tells Quoyle that he and Mercalia are moving to California. The news breaks Quoyle’s heart. Now he’s utterly alone in the world. He runs his errands, attends local government meetings and writes about them for the paper, and eats lonely meals of canned ravioli. He does not look beyond the limits of his own small routines or the borders of Mockingburg, and thus he has no sense of the chaos and disorder of late-20th-century life. He just waits quietly for his own life to begin. And, as he often tells himself, “Who knows?” Maybe it will begin soon, and maybe it will be amazing.
Without Partridge, Quoyle has nothing and no one to fall back on. He’s utterly alienated from his community, and this suggests that he should follow Partridge’s example by picking up and going somewhere where he will fit in. But because this is a story about love and family above all else, Quoyle remains stuck.
Themes
