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Chapter 35: The Day’s Work
Themes
and Colors
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Shipping News, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Love and Family
Redemption, Courage, and Happiness
Life and Death
Resilience and Survival
Modernity
Summary
Analysis
As winter wanes, Partridge calls Quoyle to tell him about the madness engulfing the United States. There are riots in Los Angeles. Someone shot at Mercalia’s truck on the highway, presumably because she was Black. And a disgruntled reader, angry that the Mockingburg Record refused to publish his unhinged letter to the editor about the riots, walked into the office with a machine gun and opened fire. Ed Punch and other former colleagues are dead or injured.
The timeline here fudges historical facts a little; the Rodney King Riots happened in April and May of 1992 but it’s still clearly midwinter in the story’s timeline. In any case, the increasing violence and disruption in Partridge and Mercalia’s lives contrasts sharply with the peacefulness and relative security of Quoyle’s. He’s traded some conveniences and luxuries in his move to Newfoundland, but he’s gained peace of mind. This chapter has perhaps the book’s starkest criticism of what it suggests is the chaos of modern life.
Active
Themes
When Quoyle mentions all of this to Jack—while helping his boss gut his modest haul of codfish—Jack says it’s to be expected in the States. Then he complains about the small cod and the unfair fishing regulations made by distant government authorities. He only keeps fishing because if he lets his licenses lapse, he’ll never get permits again. He doesn’t want to end up barred from lobster fishing for life.
Jack looks with contempt on the United States as a backward place, even while he acknowledges the challenged Newfoundland faces. In other words, this chapter suggests that life is—or at the very least, can be—unfair and chaotic everywhere. The good life, then, consists of finding a place where one fits in and making the most of what one has, even when it’s not easy.
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Late in February, Quoyle receives papers authorizing Nolan’s institutionalization. He feels guilty about signing them without at least seeing the old man, so he invites Wavey to join him on a trip down to St. John’s. She spends the day shopping for herself and Herry, and for Bunny and Sunshine—Quoyle has given her a list—while Quoyle visits the asylum. He brings Nolan a framed picture of a dog. Nolan seems so sane and oriented during their conversation that Quoyle plans to have him transferred back to Killick-Claw. Nolan says he wanted to be a pilot when he was younger, to escape Newfoundland forever. And he tells Quoyle about Agnis’s “trouble”—a self-administered abortion Nolan’s wife helped her with after Guy’s repeated sexual assaults left her pregnant.
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Later, Quoyle and Wavey have a nice dinner at their hotel’s dining room. They drink too much wine and go to see a movie. Then they go to bed, where they have sex for the first time. Afterwards, Wavey observes that this is the same hotel where she and Herold came on their honeymoon.
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In the morning, Quoyle learns that Nolan used a shard of glass from the picture frame to attack staff members and other ward inmates the night before. There will be no transfer back to Killick-Claw.
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