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Chapter 2: Love Knot
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
Then comes a period of upheaval for Quoyle. His father Guy and mother take their own lives—allegedly because of the serious cancer diagnoses each had recently received, but Quoyle suspects they were also motivated by financial stress. Quoyle must break the news to Dick, who’s become a member of a cult, and his father’s half-sister Agnis Hamm. Not long after the funeral, Ed Punch lays Quoyle off with the warning that it’s probably permanent this time.
Although these circumstances primarily serve as a plot device to both emphasize and complete Quoyle’s isolation, the deaths of his parents, his brother’s cult membership, and his layoff also point toward the malaise of modern society, where too many people feel alienated, purposeless, and unsupported by communal or social safety nets.
Themes
Then, Petal takes six-year-old Bunny and four-year-old Sunshine and disappears. Mrs. Moosup tells Quoyle that Petal quit her job and packed the girls into her latest boyfriend’s car with a plan to drop the girls off in Connecticut before continuing to Florida with her boyfriend. Quoyle is horrified. He can’t imagine why Petal has suddenly developed an interest in the girls—girls she’s never cared about. In contrast, he’s loved them with a sort of desperation from the second they knew Petal was pregnant.
In disappearing with the girls, Petal deprives Quoyle of all the things that give his life meaning: his relationship to her (dysfunctional though it is) and his relationship to his daughters which, while imperfect, still comes closer to the idea of familial love and support the book celebrates. Quoyle’s desperate love for his daughters suggests his capacity, and his desire, to change.
Themes
The girls are still missing with Quoyle’s Aunt Agnis—a large, kindhearted, no-nonsense woman—comes to visit. She makes tea. She’s there when the police call to tell Quoyle that Petal and her boyfriend have died in a horrific, fiery car accident and that it appears she sold Bunny and Sunshine to a man named Bruce Cudd for $7,000. Quoyle can’t imagine this; he wants to rehabilitate Petal’s image for Agnis. Agnis knows he’s being ridiculous. But she also sees that he’s essentially kindhearted and innocent, like his grandfather, Sian Quoyle.
Petal’s human trafficking of her daughters emphasizes her soulless selfishness. It also speaks to a perversion of the familial love which the book holds up as an ideal—a purer love like the kind Quoyle feels. But by now, Agnis has arrived and has already started to show Quoyle (and readers) that there’s another way. She cares for Quoyle because he’s family. And in fact, she demonstrates love when she sees his flaws, like his desire to cast Petal as a better person than she was.
Themes
Agnis reminds Quoyle of their complicated family history. Sian Quoyle was a Newfoundlander and a capable seal hunter, at least until the day he had a seizure and drowned at the age of 12. He left behind a child—Guy—conceived with his sister Addy. Addy’s second partner, her older brother Turvey, drowned too. Later, she married Cokey Hamm, the father of her girls. After he died, she brought Guy, Agnis, and her two other daughters to America.
Although the book celebrates families, it doesn’t idealize them. Families aren’t perfect but are important despite their flaws—even when these are major. Addy’s story also speaks to the resilience the book celebrates in its Newfoundlanders. She finds a way to keep going even after a long string of tragic losses.
Themes
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The police call back to report that they’ve found Bunny and Sunshine in Bruce Cudd’s apartment. Although they were naked and Cudd clearly had intent, they believe they got the girls out before he had a chance to sexually abuse them. Agnis goes with Quoyle to pick them up at the Social Services Office. Afterward, Quoyle asks her to stay and help them out, and she agrees.
It's interesting to note how calmly Agnis reacts to what really amount to extraordinary circumstances in Quoyle’s and the girls’ lives. This hints at her own resilience, suggesting that she herself has had her own share of chaos and suffering. And her willingness to help shows how much even a capable and resilient person needs a family.
Themes
