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Chapter 6: Between Ships
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
On his way to the Gammy Bird offices, Quoyle drives past a woman and a boy (later identified as Wavey and Herry) walking alongside the road. He arrives just in time to catch managing editor Tertius Card—a brusque, impatient man—on his way out. Card turns around and shows Quoyle inside. Newspaper owner Jack Buggit is at home with a cold, so Tert introduces Quoyle to Billy Pretty, a short man in his late 70s, and B. Beaufield Nutbeem, a British ex-pat who covers foreign news off the radio. Nutbeem warns Quoyle that Card will re-write his articles to be full of typos and malapropisms, which Jack believes add humor and interest to the paper.
Wavey and Herry walk because that’s the option available to them. Wavey doesn’t let circumstances dictate her life for her—she does what she needs to do to get where she wants to go. The fact that she immediately catches Quoyle’s eye insinuates that he needs to pay attention to her example. The book has already made clear that one of Quoyle’s primary failings is an inability to stand up for himself—and by introducing Tert’s tendency to rewrite articles in a way that makes his reporters seem less capable hints that one such instance will test Quoyle’s development later on.
Themes
Tert shows Quoyle his desk, telling him to read back issues while he waits for Buggit to recover and give him his official assignments. The Gammy Bird is nothing like the Mockingburg Record. Ads fill much of the layout. Each issue features lurid photographs of car accidents and sexual abuse stories. And then there’s the “near-libelous gossip” written by one Junior Suggs. It’s a tough, unflinching little paper, and Quoyle doesn’t know if he’ll be able to fit in.
The differences between the Record and the Bird forcefully emphasize how much Quoyle’s life has changed in the move to Newfoundland. Interestingly, he frets that he won’t manage to do a good job when readers know that he wasn’t really doing a good job in New York. And in fact, his ability to discern what makes the paper work—its gossipy style—suggest he might do better.
Themes
When Jack Buggit shows up a few days later, he tells Quoyle his—and the paper’s—history. Jack’s ancestors were all fishermen, and he would have followed in their footsteps if changing government regulations after Newfoundland joined Canada hadn’t ruined the sector. Over the years, the Canadian government’s employment services assigned Buggit to a string of jobs—at a leather tannery, a machine plant, a paper mill, a power plant, and the glove factory that used to occupy the abandoned building out by Quoyle’s Point—that all failed to materialize or ended abruptly. Frustrated, Buggit struck on the newspaper idea himself. Canada Manpower helped him get training and he founded the Gammy Bird.
At a few points, Agnis has remembered how difficult life in Newfoundland was “before”—before the island became an official province of Canada in 1949. But it’s also been very clear that life is still hard here. Jack further unpacks that difficult truth, that modernity doesn’t necessarily always fulfill its promises. This speech also reveals the provenance of the mysterious empty building on the Point: it was a glove factory meant to bring in the jobs that would rejuvenate the local economy. Clearly, that failed, suggesting that true solutions must come from locals rather than distant officials.
Themes
Buggit tells Quoyle that the Gammy Bird isn’t like other papers. They don’t hire women. They don’t print the government line. They make sure to have several salacious stories per issue, and they always, always feature a car accident on the front page—they make it up if they have to. As Nutbeem already told Quoyle, the typos are a part of the deal, too. Buggit assigns Quoyle to the shipping news—a list of ships coming in and out of Killick-Claw harbor—and car accidents. The thought of the latter horrifies the traumatized Quoyle, and he’s nearly in tears when he stumbles out of Buggit’s office.
In many ways, despite his nontraditional path into the industry, Jack is very old-fashioned. Interestingly, he’s also the antithesis of Quoyle. Quoyle can’t stand up for himself; Jack never questions his ability to order his own life or the rightness of his own decisions. People who disagree, he insinuates, may show themselves out. And then he assigns Quoyle to the worst and most traumatic beat: covering the traffic accidents that remind him so much of his recent losses. Clearly, to survive, Quoyle will have to face his fears.
Themes
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