In the following passage, Paddy responds to Yank's sentiments regarding the ship and its relationship to his working class comrades. Notably, Paddy's view on the situation is very different from Yank's, and far less optimistic for the future. Using allusion and simile, Paddy contrasts his ideal view of the world with Yank's more modern, progressive understanding:
PADDY: Oh, to be back in the fine days of my youth, ochone! Oh, there was fine beautiful ships them days—clippers wid tall masts touching the sky—fine strong men in them—men that was sons of the sea as if ’twas the mother that bore them.
This simile connects humanity back to nature as its home or origin point, contrasting the view of Yank, who believes that the ship is the natural "home" of these working-class men. In keeping with the theme of romanticizing the past, Paddy's statement that men will be born from the sea is likely meant to allude to Greek and Roman mythology. In these myths, the goddess of love and beauty, Aphrodite/Venus (depending on the tradition), was born from the ocean and rose out of the waves on a shell.
Paddy, like Yank, engages in a form of romanticized imagination—but while Yank looks to the future for his salvation, Paddy draws on the myths and legends of the past for comfort.
In Scene 1, Yank and Paddy serve both as debate partners and narrative foils, each representing a commonly held stance on "progress" during the modernist period. On the one hand, there is Paddy: a working-class man, to be sure, but a man fixed on the beauty of nature and the romanticism of the past. Paddy rejects progress and industrialization as antithetical to the human spirit, which he seems to think will languish if it becomes too dependent upon and integrated within the machine.
Paddy's nostalgia almost verges on unreality. Note, for instance, the following passage from Scene 1, in which Paddy describes an old ship sailing through the night:
PADDY: Then you’d see [the ship] driving through the gray night, her sails stretching aloft all silver and white, not a sound on the deck, the lot of us dreaming dreams, till you’d believe ’twas no real ship at all you was on but a ghost ship like the Flying Dutchman they say does be roaming the seas forevermore widout touching a port.
Paddy alludes to "old world" legends, comparing his imagined ship to the Flying Dutchman—a ghostly pirate ship of European myth. Where Paddy removes himself from reality, Yank does the opposite: he throws himself headfirst into prospects for the future, embracing modernity and seeing the potential for freedom in it. For Paddy, freedom lies in the past; for Yank, freedom lies in the future.
In the following excerpt from Scene 1, Long goes on a tirade against the upper class, condemning them for making him and his working-class comrades "wage slaves" on the ship they work on. In the course of his rant, Long turns the "beast" motif on its head and uses metaphor, redirecting it to describe the exploitative behavior of the upper classes:
LONG: But what d’they care for the Bible—them lazy, bloated swine what travels first cabin? Them’s the ones. They dragged us down’til we’re on’y wage slaves in the bowels of a bloody ship, sweatin’, burnin’ up, eatin’ coal dust! Hit’s them’s ter blame—the damned Capitalist clarss!
Long emphasizes his disdain for the bourgeoisie through metaphor, stating that the first-class passengers traveling on the boat are "lazy, bloated swine." Curiously, Long and his fellow workers are "sweatin'" and "eatin' coal dust," but it is the first-class passengers and not the workers that are dirty enough to merit the title of "swine." Their dirtiness, according to Long, is a moral one, and this is because these members of the "Capitalist class" care nothing for the "Bible." Long holds up religion as a standard for moral virtue that the upper class is incapable of achieving.
It is important to note that this passage makes two allusions to Karl Marx's seminal communist texts, Das Kapital (trans. Capital) and the Communist Manifesto. The phrase "Capitalist class" and the term "wage slave" are both pulled from Marx's body of work.
In the following excerpt from Scene 2, Mildred attempts to articulate her need to feel like she is a part of something larger than herself. In the past, Mildred participated in projects of "social reform" in New York City, which would have meant traveling through the slums and tenements trying to convince impoverished people to give up their bad habits and turn to the Lord. Interestingly, in her justification, Mildred alludes to perhaps one of the most famous social reformers of the late 19th century:
MILDRED: [Protesting with a trace of genuine earnestness] Please do not mock at my attempts to discover how the other half lives. Give me credit for some sort of groping sincerity in that at least. I would like to help them. I would like to be of some use in the world. Is it my fault I don’t know how? I would like to be sincere, to touch life somewhere.
Mildred makes reference to How the Other Half Lives, a doctrine of social reform written several decades earlier by Jacob Riis. Riis spent a great deal of time in the New York City tenements in the 1880s, documenting crime, poverty, and the terrible living conditions therein. Riis, like Mildred, takes on a very condescending tone towards those in poverty.
