The Shipping News: Chapter 39: Shining Hubcaps  Summary & Analysis

The ice is breaking up a week later when Quoyle retrieves his boat, finally, from Alvin Yark. That night, Quoyle and Wavey and the kids have dinner at Dennis and Beety’s house. Dennis is restless. Quoyle knows he’s anxious about work—there’s so little in Killick-Claw that he and Beety are considering a move to the mainland. Quoyle doesn’t want them to go, as he knows that if they do, they will never come back. Hardly anyone does and those who do, like Agnis, aren’t the same as when they left. And anyway, Dennis’s restlessness seems bigger than that. 

Eventually, Quoyle and Wavey take the kids home. After his girls are asleep, Quoyle runs himself a bath—the handmade copper tub in the Burke place is the first tub that’s ever properly fit him—and sinks into it. He realizes that recently, he has started to feel confident, even joyful, for the first time in his life.

A few hours later, the jangling telephone wakes Quoyle from sleep. It’s Dennis. Jack is lost at sea. He went out in the morning to set his lobster traps and never came home. They’ve called Search and Rescue. Two hours later, Dennis calls back to say they found Jack’s body stuck in a lobster pot line. It seems that his foot got tangled and he lost his knife trying to free himself. Mrs. Buggit has been waiting for this eventuality for her entire marriage. And while she’s grief-stricken, she’s grateful to at least have a body to bury.

Bunny wants to go to the “awake” to see Uncle Jack. Quoyle isn’t sure it’s a good idea, but Wavey encourages him to stop trying to protect his daughters from death. In the end, he brings both girls to the crowded Buggit house, where Jack lies peacefully in a coffin in the living room while Dennis and Beety search fruitlessly for his lodge pin. Bunny disconcerts Quoyle—and eventually Wavey—with the pointed way she stares at Jack, as if waiting for him to wake up. But just as Wavey is about to pull the child away, Jack does wake up with a loud cough and a sputter of seawater.

Quoyle drives Dennis to the hospital behind the ambulance carrying Jack. He was in a coma-like state induced by the freezing water and there’s no reason to think he won’t recover. Meanwhile, Wavey tries to explain what happened to Bunny. Jack wasn’t really dead, or he wouldn’t have woken up. Death, she says, is permanent. Bunny wants to check on the broken-necked bird, and when Ken drives them to the beach, it’s gone. She concludes that it, too, came back to life. Later Jack tells Quoyle that as he was drowning, he came to believe that he was a pickle spear in a jar, just waiting for someone to pull him out. This story—and his own newfound happiness—inspire Quoyle. If Jack can come back to life, maybe he can, too.