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 Oceanworld—the fish, the turtles, and the old blind sea-lion—who lack discernible emotions. Through Roley’s struggle to navigate the blurred lines between humans and animals, Kennedy suggests that so-called “human” consciousness may not be anything special—for humans and animals alike, what looks like a coherent personality may just be arbitrary, impermanent quirks of brain function.
From the beginning of the story, Kennedy’s descriptions of Samson blur the line between human and animal. The story opens with Roley going to “say hi to Samson.” Without any context, readers assume that Samson is another human until Kennedy reveals in the second sentence that Samson is a dolphin. Roley continues to describe Samson in ways that give the dolphin human characteristics. In the first paragraph, for example, Roley calls Samson a “faithful old crowd-pleaser.” He also hopes that the dolphin died in his sleep, suggesting that he considers Samson to be on the same emotional level, and therefore worthy of the same empathy, as a human being. Furthermore, when Roley’s boss Declan refers coldly to Samson as “it,” Roley responds by calling the dolphin “him,” saying that he “wasn’t going to call Samson an ‘it.’” This, again, suggests that Samson is humanlike in Roley’s eyes. Significantly, Roley theorizes that Samson resonated with the crowds at Oceanworld specifically because he was so humanlike: he was the “only creature at the aquarium who seemed to be able to create a facial expression.” Facial expressions give insight into someone’s inner thoughts and feelings, so Samson’s expressive face gave audiences (and Roley) a sense that the dolphin had a complex, humanlike inner life.
While Kennedy describes Samson as humanlike, she describes Roley’s wife, Liz, as resembling an animal. Roley describes his wife as having an “emptied, passive face,” much like the “vacant” turtles and the fish that had “no expression whatsoever.” Her brain damage left her without discernible emotions or desires, and Roley has become more her caretaker than her companion—a relationship that echoes his work with the animals at Oceanworld. One of the animals Roley cares for is the old, blind sea-lion who has eyes “fogged over” with cataracts and who behaves in a repetitive, compulsive way. Roley describes Liz in a way that mirrors the sea-lion: he notes her mysterious tendency to repetitively run “her hand slowly over her face as if memorizing its shape.” Even though Liz is human, her current existence doesn’t seem so different from the sea-lion’s. Kennedy’s repeated ocean imagery also creates parallels between Liz and the other Oceanworld animals. Roley describes the aquarium’s penguins as “Gimlet-eyed,” a word that he vaguely associates with “something ice-cold…that twisted in the deep.” Kennedy echoes this description later in the story when Roley comes home to his wife and “watches her stop and consider, slow as a tide turning.” As he does with the penguins, Roley seems to intuit that his wife might still have an inner life, but it is buried deep, making it as mysterious as the ocean and inaccessible to him.
The death of Samson, alongside Roley’s obsession with the sudden randomness of his wife’s accident, leads Roley to meditate on the fact that ultimately humans (like animals) are no more than bodies. Through Roley, Kennedy suggests that consciousness and so-called humanity come from nothing so enduring as a soul, but are instead haphazard combinations of neurology and physiology. Roley suffers as he remembers the moment of his wife’s accident as being “like someone dropping a melon on concrete.” The gory physicality of this image recurs later when he thinks of Declan describing to the audience the part of Samson’s body that is responsible for echolocation: “A kind of big FOREHEAD like a melon!” In describing both human and animal minds as simple “melons,” Kennedy highlights the total dependency of complex intelligence on physical, breakable, and ultimately unglamorous bodies. Looking at Samson’s dead body, Roley notices its defining “nicks and cuts, marks and old scars.” This leads him to think, “sick with grief,” of his wife’s body, specifically “the small secret place under her hair where there was still a tiny dent.” Dead Samson, it seems, is equivalent to Liz after her accident: Roley sees both as bodies emptied of their once-vibrant personalities and consciousness. Roley also notes that outward expressions are no guarantee of inner life. Liz’s new scar gives her “permanently quizzical expression, as if she was raising her eyebrows knowingly, ironically: a look long gone.” That is, she looks thoughtful, which only makes her changed personality all the more painful for Roley. This moment echoes Roley’s description of Samson’s seemingly expressive face; he once took Samson’s face of a sign of his unique personality, but it’s no longer clear if that face reflected real consciousness or just masked blankness. Through this parallel, Kennedy draws attention to the often-arbitrary ways in which humans interpret expression and intelligence.
At the end of the story, Roley brings his wife a snowdome from Oceanworld, which she holds passively instead of shaking. Despairingly, he thinks that “what they should put in them […] is a little brain, something to knock around uselessly in that bubble of fluid as snow swirled down ceaselessly and never stopped, while some big hand somewhere just kept on shaking.” With this metaphor, Roley reduces the human brain to the importance of a cheap, mass-produced object. The final image of the big hand suggests not only that humans no more special than animals, but that the whole idea of intelligent, active participants in the world is a farce: like the animals trapped at Oceanworld, humans are no more than fragile lumps of flesh, subject to an overriding randomness.
Humans, Animals, and Consciousness ThemeTracker
Humans, Animals, and Consciousness Quotes in Little Plastic Shipwreck
They hadn't taken any of her brain out, the doctors had explained to Roley; they were definite on that point. They'd put her in an induced coma until the brain swelling went down, then somehow pieced those sections of her skull back together. How did they do it? Riveting? Gluing? Roley had no idea. He imagined them with a tiny Black & Decker, a wisp of smoke rising, putting in a neat line of holes then stitching it with wire.
Declan swore long and low when he came over and looked into the pool.
“Use the chains,” he said dismissively. “I reckon that thing weighs one hundred and fifty kilos. Haul it out and then drain the pool.”
“What will I do with him?” Roley couldn't help the personal pronoun, wasn't going to call Samson an “it.”
Roley had a theory that the reason visitors loved Samson so much was that he was the only creature at the aquarium who seemed to be able to create a facial expression, apart from the sea-lion Rex, whose eyes were so fogged over with milky-blue cataracts […] The turtles were totally vacant—they had the hateful, icy glare of an old drunk—and of course the fish had no expression whatsoever. Just looked at you as they cruised past, a vegetable with fins. No short-term memory, that's what Kaz said when he told her his theory. “That's the cliche, right?” she said, tapping the glass of one of the tanks. “Nothing going on. You put one in a fishbowl, and they start swimming around in circles, and every time it's like: Look, a little plastic shipwreck! Five seconds later: Look, a little plastic shipwreck!”
And the penguins, even the ones with the little tufty eyebrows, still had to quirk their whole heads even to convey a response. Mostly they just looked shifty. Gimleteyed, thought Roley, whatever that meant. Whatever gimlets were. Something ice-cold, anyway, that twisted in deep.
Sometimes at night he'd feel Liz's hand land uncertainly on him and graze back and forth. Like seagrass on a current, it felt to him, and just as random. He'd take her hand and imagine silvery bubbles escaping from their mouths, floating up towards the ceiling fan, him keeping his breaths measured and even.
They'd stepped through the sliding doors barred pointlessly with two chairs because the thing had no railing, and his lovely, witty wife, looking for a way to help out, had taken a heavy platter out there to pass around and, turning round to answer someone's stupid question, had stepped straight off the edge of the deck, falling to the ground below.
[…] “Nobody's fault,” Roley kept saying, breathing fast through his mouth, panting, he couldn't help it […] and every time he circled the stunned minute of what had happened, it hit him afresh, obliterating everything else so he had to learn it again, piece by piece.
Roley looked at Samson's grey flank, noticing the nicks and cuts on it, the marks and old scars. He thought, sick with grief, about the way his wife's fingers sought out the small secret place under her hair where there was a tiny dent, still. He laid his hand on that flank, feeling its muscle, and he heard the moment waiting, and said into it, “You fucking do it.”
“I’m home early,” he said.
“Are you?” she replied.
“Can I get you anything?” he said, emptying his pockets onto the dining-room table, watching her stop and consider, slow as a tide turning.
“No,” she said finally, “there's nothing I want,” and Roley thought, that's right, there's nothing: want was what they had taken out of her, back when they were assuring him nothing was removed.
“Here,” he said cheerfully, “I got you this.” He gave her one of the snowdomes, and as she held it he realised she was the first person he'd ever seen cradling one and not shaking it. She just held it obediently with that emptied, passive face, gazing at the plastic penguins inside.
What they should put in them, thought Roley, is a little brain, something to knock around uselessly in that bubble of fluid as snow swirled down ceaselessly and never stopped, while some big hand somewhere just kept on shaking.