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Chapter 18: Lobster Pie
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
On a day when Tert Card’s foul mood drives everyone out of the office, Quoyle, Billy, and Nutbeem drive over to Killick-Claw for lunch. They compare the week’s stories. The weather has been strange—and frozen ducks fell from the clouds over the island. There hasn’t been a single car wreck in a week, but Nutbeem has written up seven sexual assault stories, including one in which a drunk fisherman assaulted a bar bouncer with a frozen fish. A woman in Misky Bay assaulted her own grandmother with a towel rack then tried to light her house on fire. Billy thinks it’s due to the change in the weather and the impending shift of the seasons. He notes that he’ll have to go out to Gaze Island to see to his father’s grave before it’s too late in the season, and he invites Quoyle to go with him on Saturday.
In stark contrast to his New York life, it seems that Quoyle has made friends quite naturally on Newfoundland, where his colleagues accept him as one of their own. The news stories inject local color—color which, incidentally, hasn’t always impressed real Newfoundland’s readers of this book—but once again, this serves less to mock a population than to point out that horror, misery, and suffering exist in equal measures no matter where a person goes. So do love, friendship, and happiness, and it’s those—the lunch shared with friends or the old man’s enduring love for his long-dead father—that make life sweet.
Themes
Quoyle learns from Billy and Nutbeem that, prior to World War II, Misky Bay was the larger harbor. But so many munitions dropped into the water during the war that no one wants to drop anchor there anymore. This has been a boon for Killick-Claw harbor (and town), allowing it to become the primary northern harbor over the past four decades.
This chapter also considers the way that times change, and not always for the better. The munitions point to technological advancements and the way that humans don’t always consider the ecological and social ramifications of modernization.
Themes
Quoyle’s boat feature for the week is the Buddy, a brand-new fishing boat that exploded when its owner changed a lightbulb. A leaking propane tank had filled the cabin with gas. The owner had been married for less than two weeks when the explosion killed him. Nutbeem notes that Jack will like that story for its “Blood, Boats, and Blowups” drama. The men prepare to return to the office.
If Quoyle (or readers) needed another reminder that life is fleeting and tragedy is commonplace, they can find it in Buddy’s story. This story—like the other tragedies in the book, big and small—help Quoyle put his own tragedies in perspective. His loveless childhood and marriage will always hurt and will always be tragic. But he’s not the only person in the world to have suffered. In fact, joy and sadness are mixed in everyone’s lives.
Themes
