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Chapter 5: A Rolling Hitch
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
Sitting by the campfire, Quoyle and Agnis discuss making the house livable. It needs new windows, a new door, new drywall, a new waterline, new second-story floors, and repairs to chimneys and stovepipes. There’s only an outhouse, and Quoyle doesn’t relish the idea of Bunny and Sunshine—or himself—having to use it. Nor does he like the idea of having to buy a boat to cross the bay between the house and town. He gets seasick so easily, and he never learned to swim. In any case, they can’t stay in the house in its current state, so they decide to find a place to rent in Killick-Claw temporarily.
The amount of work necessary on the house mirrors the effort required for Quoyle to rebuild his life after his recent tragedies. Notably, moving forward requires making decision and taking actions, things that Quoyle—who thus far seems to have let fate and circumstance decide his path for him—isn’t used to. Making a life in Newfoundland will also require Quoyle to face his fears, which in the aggregate are represented here by his fear of water.
Themes
By the time they’ve made it back to Ig’s Store—where they stopped and asked for directions to the Point the previous day—a full blown blizzard is raging. Ig’s proprietor directs Quoyle and Agnis to the Tickle Motel, Restaurant, and Bar, a seedy place where the only available room is the honeymoon suite because the hotel is hosting a darts championship.
The blizzard comes along just in time to remind Quoyle just how difficult and unpredictable this new life he’s chose can be. And the Tickle Motel doesn’t give him a favorable first impression of the community, which seems less traditional than straight up backwoods.
Themes
The hotel is, in Bunny’s words, “like a war.” Everything is in disrepair. The doorknob comes off the door in Quoyle’s hand. The shower barely works. In the restaurant, it takes more than an hour for their food to arrive. They can hear groups in the rooms on either side of them carousing all night. The inner and the outer doorknobs come off, effectively trapping them inside. It is at least better than sleeping in the car again, Agnis points out. In the morning, she writes a call for help on a pillowcase and hangs it in the window while Quoyle, Bunny, and Sunshine pound on the door and shout. Eventually, the front desk clerk rescues them. He points to the alarm button—a nondescript switch near the ceiling—and says they should have just used that if they needed help. Agnis promises God she’ll be good if she can escape the hotel. She’d forgotten how rough the island could be, but it’s coming back to her now.
The scenes in the motel humorously reinforce the difficulty of Quoyle’s circumstances. But they also hint at how and why he’s found himself where he is. He takes what life hands him without complaint. And while sometimes that’s the right thing to do—it’s better to wait out the blizzard in a building rather than in the car—there’s a balance between acceptance and passivity, and this is a balance Quoyle needs to find. The desk clerk points out he alarm, suggesting that Quoyle could have taken a more efficient role in his rescue, but Quoyle doesn’t yet know how to recognize help when he sees it.
Themes
