News of the World chronicles the travels of Captain Kidd, an elderly man who roams the Texas backcountry and reads the news aloud in small towns. Captain Kidd’s services are wildly popular with people who thirst for information about the world outside their isolated communities. Yet they are generally unwilling to engage with any news that is controversial or challenges their preconceptions. In order to keep everyone happy and scrape out a living, Captain Kidd focuses on distant and positive events, rather than challenging or political issues. The blurry line between entertaining stories and salient news in Captain Kidd’s readings demonstrates both the importance of absorbing and understanding political events and the difficulty of doing so from an impartial perspective.
Captain Kidd portrays himself as a purveyor of impartial news, but in order to make money and stay safe he must often dip into storytelling. To make a living, he travels to remote towns with little access to newspapers and low literacy rates. At each stop, he selects articles from all the major papers and reads them aloud to a rapt audience. However, the captain’s profession doesn’t just entail reading the news. He must dress carefully and speak in a certain way in order to “present the appearance of authority and wisdom” at each reading. For him, the news is a performance rather than a straightforward transmission of information. Moreover, in order to remain popular (and make a living) he must cater to the townspeople’s interests and avoid challenging their preconceptions. The captain usually chooses articles about foreign countries or far-off events, rather than focusing on issues that directly affect the towns he visits, like the end of slavery and the tumultuous process of Reconstruction. This isn’t a personal failing on the Captain’s part. The few times when he does speak about controversial local issues, hostility and even violence ensue: after reading about the 15th Amendment (which gave African Americans the right to vote) in Wichita Falls, the Captain must work to calm his audience. In Dallas, infighting between two corrupt congressmen surfaces at the reading and causes an outright fistfight. To avoid commotion, Captain Kidd must turn his readings into a form of entertainment, rather than a meaningful engagement with politics.
The well-intentioned but flawed nature of Captain Kidd’s profession exemplifies the tension between being rooted in a community and being able to examine that community critically. The willingness of poor townspeople to pay for Captain Kidd’s services shows their desire to engage with political events and feel part of a larger world. Yet their understandable investment in their own communities gives them a limited perspective and prevents them from seriously engaging with the news or absorbing any information that counters their existing ideas. On the other hand, Captain Kidd has a wide understanding of the world around him and is able to examine politics dispassionately. For example, when the fight between Congressmen Davis and Hamilton is consuming Dallas, it’s only he who understands that both men are equally corrupt pawns in larger governmental mismanagement. At the same time, he lacks the sense of belonging in a community the way his audiences do, and often feels wistful for their sense of belonging within their particular communities. Through this contrast, the novel argues that it’s difficult to reconcile community loyalty with a wider understanding of political events.
Captain Kidd’s near-universal appeal in the towns he visits indicates the enduring human desire to feel part of a larger, outside world. Yet his readings, which by necessity pander to the beliefs—however wrongheaded—of his audience, show the difficulty of interacting with that larger world without being influenced by one’s preconceptions.
Related Themes from Other Texts
News and Storytelling ThemeTracker
News and Storytelling Quotes in News of the World
If people had true knowledge of the world perhaps they would not take up arms and so perhaps he could be an aggregator of information from distant places and then the world would be a more peaceful place […] And then he had come to think that what people needed, at bottom, was not only information but tales of the remote, the mysterious, dressed up as hard information.
He turned the page. He said, This is writing. This is printing. This tells us of all the things we ought to know in the world. And also that we ought to want to know.
And the newspapers, they say nothing about this at all or about the poor at all, Doris said. There are great holes in your newspapers. Nobody sees them. God sees them.
Maybe life is just carrying news. Surviving to carry the news. Maybe we have just one message, and it is delivered to us when we are born and we are never sure what it says; it may have nothing to do with us personally but it must be carried by hand through a life, all the way, and at the end handed over, sealed.
She never learned to value those things that white people valued. The greatest pride of the Kiowa was to do without, to make use of anything at hand; they were almost vain of their ability to go without water, food, and shelter. Life was not safe and nothing could make it so, neither fashionable dresses nor bank accounts.
