The Shipping News Themes

The Shipping News follows 36-year-old Quoyle and his family as they move from the U.S. to the remote Newfoundland coast. Due to numerous instances in which important family members have hurt or abandoned Quoyle, Quoyle believes himself to be fundamentally unworthy of love. However, Quoyle begins to rethink his views on love and family when his best friend Partridge moves to California, a move that Quoyle views as yet another abandonment. Partridge, though, is the…

When Quoyle moves his family to Newfoundland, he’s feels like a failure at life: his father Guy and brother Dick mocked him all his life for his physical appearance, he never got the hang of his job at the Mockingburg Record, and he couldn’t satisfy his wife Petal. But in Newfoundland, Quoyle finds redemption. His remaining family members come to respect him, as do friends like Billy Pretty. He does such a…

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…

When Quoyle, Bunny, Sunshine, and Agnis move to Newfoundland, it seems as if they are stepping back in time. Their ancestral house on Quoyle’s Point has been standing there for at least a century and has been empty for the past 40 years. It doesn’t have modern conveniences like electricity or indoor plumbing. Agnis is determined to live there, even as it becomes more and more evident that neither she nor anyone…