Humans, Animals, and Consciousness Theme Analysis

In “Little Plastic Shipwreck,” Roley grieves for his wife, Liz, who has been left with brain damage after an accident at a friend’s party. Simultaneously, while Roley is working at Oceanworld theme park, an elderly dolphin named Samson dies. Cate Kennedy draws parallels between Samson’s humanlike intelligence and emotion and the “lovely, witty” person Liz was before the accident. Furthermore, Roley’s descriptions of his wife post-accident resemble his descriptions of the other animals at Oceanworld—the fish, the turtles, and the old blind sea-lion—who lack discernible emotions. Through Roley’s struggle to navigate the blurred lines between humans and animals, Kennedy suggests that so-called “human” consciousness may not be anything special—for humans and animals alike, what looks like a coherent personality may just be arbitrary, impermanent quirks of brain function.

From the beginning of the story, Kennedy’s descriptions of Samson blur the line between human and animal. The story opens with Roley going to “say hi to Samson.” Without any context, readers assume that Samson is another human until Kennedy reveals in the second sentence that Samson is a dolphin. Roley continues to describe Samson in ways that give the dolphin human characteristics. In the first paragraph, for example, Roley calls Samson a “faithful old crowd-pleaser.” He also hopes that the dolphin died in his sleep, suggesting that he considers Samson to be on the same emotional level, and therefore worthy of the same empathy, as a human being. Furthermore, when Roley’s boss Declan refers coldly to Samson as “it,” Roley responds by calling the dolphin “him,” saying that he “wasn’t going to call Samson an ‘it.’” This, again, suggests that Samson is humanlike in Roley’s eyes. Significantly, Roley theorizes that Samson resonated with the crowds at Oceanworld specifically because he was so humanlike: he was the “only creature at the aquarium who seemed to be able to create a facial expression.” Facial expressions give insight into someone’s inner thoughts and feelings, so Samson’s expressive face gave audiences (and Roley) a sense that the dolphin had a complex, humanlike inner life.

While Kennedy describes Samson as humanlike, she describes Roley’s wife, Liz, as resembling an animal. Roley describes his wife as having an “emptied, passive face,” much like the “vacant” turtles and the fish that had “no expression whatsoever.” Her brain damage left her without discernible emotions or desires, and Roley has become more her caretaker than her companion—a relationship that echoes his work with the animals at Oceanworld. One of the animals Roley cares for is the old, blind sea-lion who has eyes “fogged over” with cataracts and who behaves in a repetitive, compulsive way. Roley describes Liz in a way that mirrors the sea-lion: he notes her mysterious tendency to repetitively run “her hand slowly over her face as if memorizing its shape.” Even though Liz is human, her current existence doesn’t seem so different from the sea-lion’s. Kennedy’s repeated ocean imagery also creates parallels between Liz and the other Oceanworld animals. Roley describes the aquarium’s penguins as “Gimlet-eyed,” a word that he vaguely associates with “something ice-cold…that twisted in the deep.” Kennedy echoes this description later in the story when Roley comes home to his wife and “watches her stop and consider, slow as a tide turning.” As he does with the penguins, Roley seems to intuit that his wife might still have an inner life, but it is buried deep, making it as mysterious as the ocean and inaccessible to him.

The death of Samson, alongside Roley’s obsession with the sudden randomness of his wife’s accident, leads Roley to meditate on the fact that ultimately humans (like animals) are no more than bodies. Through Roley, Kennedy suggests that consciousness and so-called humanity come from nothing so enduring as a soul, but are instead haphazard combinations of neurology and physiology. Roley suffers as he remembers the moment of his wife’s accident as being “like someone dropping a melon on concrete.” The gory physicality of this image recurs later when he thinks of Declan describing to the audience the part of Samson’s body that is responsible for echolocation: “A kind of big FOREHEAD like a melon!” In describing both human and animal minds as simple “melons,” Kennedy highlights the total dependency of complex intelligence on physical, breakable, and ultimately unglamorous bodies. Looking at Samson’s dead body, Roley notices its defining “nicks and cuts, marks and old scars.” This leads him to think, “sick with grief,” of his wife’s body, specifically “the small secret place under her hair where there was still a tiny dent.” Dead Samson, it seems, is equivalent to Liz after her accident: Roley sees both as bodies emptied of their once-vibrant personalities and consciousness. Roley also notes that outward expressions are no guarantee of inner life. Liz’s new scar gives her “permanently quizzical expression, as if she was raising her eyebrows knowingly, ironically: a look long gone.” That is, she looks thoughtful, which only makes her changed personality all the more painful for Roley. This moment echoes Roley’s description of Samson’s seemingly expressive face; he once took Samson’s face of a sign of his unique personality, but it’s no longer clear if that face reflected real consciousness or just masked blankness. Through this parallel, Kennedy draws attention to the often-arbitrary ways in which humans interpret expression and intelligence.

At the end of the story, Roley brings his wife a snowdome from Oceanworld, which she holds passively instead of shaking. Despairingly, he thinks that “what they should put in them […] is a little brain, something to knock around uselessly in that bubble of fluid as snow swirled down ceaselessly and never stopped, while some big hand somewhere just kept on shaking.” With this metaphor, Roley reduces the human brain to the importance of a cheap, mass-produced object. The final image of the big hand suggests not only that humans no more special than animals, but that the whole idea of intelligent, active participants in the world is a farce: like the animals trapped at Oceanworld, humans are no more than fragile lumps of flesh, subject to an overriding randomness.