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Dialect
Key Examples in The Hairy Ape
Scene One
Explanation and Analysis—Old Ship:
In the following passage from Scene 1, Paddy uses imagery to paint a romanticized picture of the past, describing the voyage of an older merchant vessel, likely from the 17th or 18th century:
PADDY: Oh, to be scudding south again wid the power of the Trade Wind driving her on steady through the nights and the days! Full sail on her! Nights and days! Nights when the foam of the wake would be flaming wid fire, when the sky’d be blazing and winking wid stars. Or the full of the moon maybe.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Nostalgia:
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:
Unlock with LitCharts A+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.
Related Themes:
Explanation and Analysis—Industrialization:
In the following passage from Scene 1, Paddy delivers a monologue in opposition to the idea that men should make machines—in this instance, a ship—their home. In order to get across this sentiment, Paddy uses the following metaphor:
Unlock with LitCharts A+PADDY: Ho-ho, divil mend you! Is it to belong to that you’re wishing? Is it a flesh and blood wheel of the engines you’d be?
Related Themes:
