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Chapter 36: Straitjacket
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
One cold, late-winter day, Quoyle arrives at the Gammy Bird office to learn that the school principal called. Bunny is in trouble; at recess, she shoved a teacher to the ground. The principal threatens to suspend Bunny until she explains her actions and apologizes. Bunny refuses. Quoyle takes her to Beety’s and soon enough, Beety has learned the whole story. The teacher was acting as a substitute in Herry’s class and when he asked to go inside at recess—he needed to pee—she couldn’t or wouldn’t understand. She made him stand against the wall as punishment for fidgeting. When he wet his pants, Bunny came in like an “avenging angel”. When Quoyle tells Agnis, she’s so enraged that she flies up from St. John’s to help him set things straight with the school.
For a while now, it sems like things have been getting better and better for Quoyle and his family. The call from the principal threatens to shatter the peace, recalling as it does Bunny’s emotional challenges from earlier years back in the states. But it turns out to be something totally different—she’s not acting out, she’s defending Herry. In this, she follows the example her father has set of kindness toward others (recall how he wanted to rescue Nolan if he could). And she shows that no matter how slow Quoyle and Wavey are taking things, they have already become a family in practice.
Themes
The next time Quoyle, Wavey, Bunny, Sunshine, and Herry drive out to the Yarks’ house, Wavey gives Bunny a silent thank you with a meaningful glance and a pressed hand. Wavey and Evvie work on a hooked rug in the house while Alvin and Quoyle work on the boat. Alvin wants to know when Quoyle and Wavey will get married. Quoyle hesitates. He doesn’t think he loves Wavey because their relationship feels so different than his one with Petal. He associates love with suffering. But he doesn’t tell Alvin that. Instead, he brings up Herold. Alvin sets the record straight. Herold was a terrible womanizer who treated Wavey badly. It wasn’t all bad when he died.
The Yarks’ house exemplifies the old way of life on the island, with both husband and wife making what’s needed by hand. Importantly, everyone pitches in, helping to the best of their ability. Everyone’s contributions are welcomed, and the more experienced teach the younger and less experienced. This provides a cozy image both of family love and of the resilience necessary to live in a place like Killick-Claw. Now readers can understand some of the affinity between Quoyle and Wavey; they’ve suffered similar things in their past marriages. They both deserve something better: each other.
Themes
In March, Jack goes seal hunting, an ancient livelihood endangered by public outrage after pictures of clubbed and bloody seals were splashed across newspapers worldwide by environmental activists. It’s still an art that Jack relishes, despite the danger of trusting one’s life to unstable ice floes. He catches a seal and expertly processes it right on the ice.
Jack’s seal hunt is yet another vestige of a rapidly-disappearing past on Newfoundland. Although the book neither celebrates nor criticizes the hunt, it’s clear that it is out of step with modern sentiments. Times change, and eventually so do traditions.
Themes
Ken goes sealing too, so Wavey shows up in Quoyle’s kitchen one night with a gift of seal-flipper pie. She doesn’t stay to eat it. But then later, after Bunny and Sunshine are in bed, she unexpectedly reappears, intent on spending the night with Quoyle. A few days later, he tells her about Petal’s cruelty and her boyfriends. Wavey tells Quoyle about Herold. They were both wounded by spouses who treated them like garbage and made them feel that they never deserved any better. But now, they are both realizing that that’s not true.
When Quoyle and Wavey share their past traumas openly, they begin to heal a little bit more. It opens up the possibility that they can find something better. The book has been showing Quoyle—and by extension, readers—a better and more noble vision of love for a long time, and now Quoyle himself begins to recognize it. In their love, Quoyle and Wavey offer each other not just happiness but a chance at redemption.
Themes
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When he’s not working on his stories, Benny Fudge sits at his desk in the Gammy Bird office and knits up a storm. This surprises Quoyle, but Billy explains that many Newfoundland men knit. It’s a sibling skill to net-mending. Then, Billy tells Quoyle a protracted and painfully bad joke about a Newfoundland truck driver who allegedly stuck his arms through the steering wheel and knit while driving.
It isn’t just the women who knit because making warm clothing is an important part of surviving in the harsh climate. Benny Fudge thus represents the resilience and cleverness of his whole society, which has found a way to thrive under such challenging conditions.
Themes
After seal season, Jack starts fishing for herring. Quoyle loves herring. One day, while he’s grilling some for a picnic with Wavey, Bunny, Sunshine, and Herry—who has started to call Quoyle “Dad” just like his daughters do—Bunny finds a dead bird. She shows it to Wavey, who simply says it’s dead—not asleep, not in heaven—and sets it aside on a rock.
As he comes close to the end of his first full year in Newfoundland, Quoyle seems like a native. He fits in here in a way he never did in New York, and the book subtly suggests that upheaval that brought him to Newfoundland was a blessing in disguise. Bunny’s bird points toward the only thing that has yet to be resolved. Neither Quoyle nor his daughters have yet faced the truth of death.
Themes
When the herring disappear, Jack starts overhauling his lobster pots. Dennis, Billy and Quoyle help. Billy wishes he could go lobster fishing, but it’s impossible to get a license any longer. Dennis wants to go, too, but Jack is intent on keeping him safe ashore. Soon, Agnis will be back from St. John’s and Quoyle thinks they can have a lobster boil to celebrate. In the corner of Jack’s fishing shack, Quoyle notices a pile of stones. Slingstones, Jack says, for anchoring the pots.
Quoyle relishes the thought of Agnis’s return—finally, all his people will be back in one place again. But the attention the book pays to the slingstones creates a heavy sense of foreboding at the beginning of lobster season. It’s hard not to think about all the times that Jack or others have narrowly escaped drowning, and to wonder when that luck will change.
Themes
