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Chapter 20: Gaze Island
Themes
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
The fog is thick, so Billy noses his boat forward cautiously. The rocks looming through the fog make Quoyle nervous, but Billy seems to know each one by name, like the Net-Man, a craggy stone that seems to catch whatever people lose in the water. Indeed, at that very minute, Quoyle spies a suitcase caught on one of its ledge, which he hooks using Billy’s gaff (a long-handled hook). This pleases Billy, who declares that Quoyle is living up to his ancestors’ wracker reputation. The suitcase is locked. It looks expensive and it’s made of leather, even though it has a rope handle. It smells terrible.
Billy navigates blind here, and although it’s dangerous he never loses his nerve. He has an innate trust in his own ability to see himself through—born of a lifetime of survival in a trying place—and thus he models the kind of resilience Quoyle still lacks. Yet, his growing comfort with the lifestyle, evidenced by his handy gaff work, suggests that he can develop it. The suitcase—which Quoyle doesn’t immediately recognize—recalls the one he saw on the deck of the Tough Baby, the one that Bayonet Melville was apparently using to get away from his wife before Quoyle and Billy arrived.
Themes
An hour later, Billy recognizes a pair of pointy rocks called the Knitting Pins that sit outside of Desperate Cove. Using an old rhyme to navigate the cove’s dangers, he expertly cuts through the fog and pulls up alongside the wharf. There’s a good restaurant nearby where they can get a hot meal and phone Tert Card for a ride. The cook and waitress at the restaurant recognize Billy and let him use the phone. Quoyle scarfs down a plate of moose meatballs, then he rushes back to the wharf, intent on opening the suitcase. It opens to reveal Bayonet Melville’s severed head.
The poetic ditty Billy uses comes down to him from previous generations. Although it’s not helpful to try to live in the past, there are valuable lessons to be gained from the wisdom and experience of one’s forbears. Quoyle’s shocking discovery of the head forces readers to think back to his visit to the Tough Baby—the fight between Bayonet and Silver Melville might have seemed inconsequential at the time, but it’s clearly not. Remember Silver’s bloodthirsty glee over the destruction wrought by the ship during the hurricane.
Themes
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