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Guy Quoyle
Bayonet and his wife Silver Melville own a yacht called the Tough Baby. They’re among Agnis Hamm’s loyal customers, and they come to Newfoundland to find her when they want their dining salon reupholstered. Bayonet and Silver have a fraught relationship, and Silver murders Bayonet, chopping his body into six pieces and throwing them overboard when she escapes on the Tough Baby to Macau.
Bayonet Melville Quotes in The Shipping News
The The Shipping News quotes below are all either spoken by Bayonet Melville or refer to Bayonet Melville. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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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.
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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.”
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Bayonet Melville Character Timeline in The Shipping News
The timeline below shows where the character Bayonet Melville appears in The Shipping News. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 13: The Dutch Cringle
...Tough Baby. Billy shouts a request to board and a white-haired man (later identified as Bayonet Melville) sticks his head out of a door. Next to the door sits a rope-handled...
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Eventually, Bayonet invites Quoyle and Billy into a salon where his wife Silver is listening to music...
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Eventually, Quoyle learns that Bayonet and Silver came to Newfoundland to have the furniture in their dining salon reupholstered by...
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Chapter 17: The Shipping News
...sense of hitting his stride. He feels like the story is good, like he captured Bayonet’s and Silver’s bloody-minded glee over the Tough Baby’s destructiveness. But Tert Card lambasts it when...
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Chapter 18: Lobster Pie
...show of enjoying the pie. Dawn ignores Bunny and turns to Quoyle, tells him how Bayonet and Silver skipped town without paying. Agnis isn’t upset. She says she’ll contact them when...
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Chapter 21: Poetic Navigation
...he rushes back to the wharf, intent on opening the suitcase. It opens to reveal Bayonet Melville’s severed head.
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Chapter 27: Newsroom
...enters the newsroom with the latest on the dead body, which the authorities believe is Bayonet Melville. While Billy types up the story at his desk, Nutbeem complains that he never...
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