Little Plastic Shipwreck Themes

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…

“Little Plastic Shipwreck” is a story defined by the hierarchy of the protagonist’s workplace, Oceanworld, in which Roley is positioned between his boss Declan at the top and the animals at the bottom. However, despite the apparent rigidity of this hierarchy, Roley succeeds in subverting it in subtle ways throughout the story through moments of compassion. By depicting the ways in which compassion can work as a counterforce to an oppressive hierarchy within the small-scale…