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Chapter 31: Sometimes You Just Lose It
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
Nutbeem’s departure means the first loss in Quoyle’s new life, and so it’s bittersweet. Nutbeem misses warmer climates—and, unlike Quoyle’s, his landing in Newfoundland was always accidental. But unlike when Partridge moved, this loss won’t leave Quoyle alone in the world. He still has his family—biological and chosen—to count on.
Themes
Quoyle and Nutbeem buy cases of alcohol, stacks of deli trays, and dozens of bags of potato chips, then they take them back to Nutbeem’s trailer. It’s mostly unremarkable, except for the thumping sound system and the sawed-down molasses barrel Nutbeem uses as a bathtub. They use this as a bowl for the chips. Quoyle only been to a few parties in his life, and this is the first one with only men. It’s free of the “sexual and social badminton” of ordinary parties but tinged with a sense of danger.
It's a mark of how isolated and friendless Quoyle’s life has been that Nutbeem’s party stands out to him so much. It also offers him a chance to reflect on what made social interactions so awkward for him in the past. His lack of confidence and others’ inability to appreciate him for himself in the first part of his life raised the stakes. Because he was starved for love, he approached all interactions with desperation.
Themes
Tert Card appears through the crowd and tells Quoyle a story about his father, Skit, and the “hairy devil” in a scream. Quoyle only catches parts of it. Skit and Alphonse were out in the winter. Skit had an intuition about dangerous holes, and he tried to warn Alphonse. But one night, Alphonse left camp. His tracks simply disappeared. And when Skit poked into the spot where they disappeared, a crevasse opened up. Then, a little hairy devil with red eyes appeared behind him and jumped down the hole, promising to return for Skit.
Tert’s story again provides local color, and it highlights the superstitions the book has ascribed to Newfoundlanders throughout. But it also points to other perennial truths, such as the fragility of life and the role of fate. It also implies things about Tert’s worldview—because he’s incapable of forming the kind of relationships that make life more meaningful, he views the world as a fundamentally unfriendly and dangerous place.
Themes
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Soon Quoyle, and everyone else, is drunk. Fights break out. And then one man grabs an axe and heads for the dock. Others follow, swarming the Borogrove and hacking at her decks with chainsaws and axes. Within 10 minutes, she has sunk. Quoyle wanders away from the party in a drunken haze after that, and he finds himself standing outside Wavey’s house and looking through the window. She’s in the kitchen, playing an accordion. After a while, he stumbles back to town.
In their drunkenness, the partygoers act out their deepest desires. Nutbeem longs for the freedom of the open seas. In contrast, the revelers don’t want to lose a member of their small, close-knit community. Finally, what Quoyle wants more than anything else in the world is Wavey, even if he’s not prepared to admit it openly.
Themes
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