Character Analysis
(Avoiding Spoilers)
Grew Up… among the last in a long line of Newfoundlander good-for-nothings and pseudo-pirates. Quoyle’s father, Guy, did little for him and expected even less. Quoyle says, “I used to imagine that I’d been given to the wrong family at birth and that somewhere in the world my real people longed for me.” Unfortunately, his father’s harsh method of childrearing flattened Quoyle.
Living… in Newfoundland. Quoyle has recently learned from an old relative, Agnis Hamm, that he’s inherited a house in Newfoundland. After the recent death of his wife, Petal, Quoyle is planning on tending the property and trying to heal. Living in the decrepit house with Agnis and his daughter, Bunny, Quoyle has a lot of adjustments to make as he begins a new life in this different, unusual place.
Profession… various. Since high school Quoyle has worked only odd jobs. Now looking for work as an ink setter, he stumbles into a reporting job at the local newspaper, reporting on car wrecks and shipping news. After Petal’s death in a car accident, he doesn’t find himself well suited to the task.
Interests… simple and few. He’s a loving father to Bunny and a kind man to everyone he meets. What he doesn’t like is more telling than what he does. He’s afraid of water – he doesn’t know how to swim – and the car crashes he reports on make him nauseous.
Relationship Status… single. Petal, Quoyle’s former lover, entered his life as randomly as she exited it. Now in Newfoundland, a local woman, Wavey Prowse, has caught his eye. Wavey is a single parent, like Quoyle, and is kind too. She’s more independent than Quoyle, though, and not nearly as timid. Though Quoyle isn’t exactly eye-catching, there may be something there between Wavey and him.
Challenge... overcoming his past traumas and building a new life for himself and his daughter. He suffers from childhood trauma, which is triggered by Agnis and in the house itself. Newfoundland, the land of his ancestors, seems to consider him an outsider, like his parents did. If Quoyle can make a life for himself in this foreign, seafaring place, he can have overcome his estrangement from the world. As Agnis tells him, “We face up to things we're afraid of because we can't go 'round 'em.”
Personality… timid, softly spoken, and a little bit aimless. However, his helplessness might be his most attractive quality. His childish nature and ineptitude make him kind and endearing.
Get to Know him in...
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An emotionally-beaten man with his young daughter moves to his ancestral home in Newfoundland to reclaim his life.
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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News is a vigorous, darkly comic, and at times magical portrait of the contemporary North American family. Quoyle, a third-rate newspaper hack, with a “head shaped like a crenshaw, no neck, reddish hair...features as bunched as kissed fingertips,” is wrenched violently out of his workaday life when his two-timing wife meets her just desserts. An aunt convinces Quoyle and his two emotionally disturbed daughters to return with her to the starkly beautiful coastal landscape of their ancestral home in Newfoundland. Here, on desolate Quoyle’s Point, in a house empty except for a few mementos of the family’s unsavory past, the battered members of three generations try to cobble up new lives. Newfoundland is a country of coast and cove where the mercury rarely rises above seventy degrees, the local culinary delicacy is cod cheeks, and it’s easier to travel by boat and snowmobile than on anything with wheels. In this harsh place of cruel storms, a collapsing fishery, and chronic unemployment, the aunt sets up as a yacht upholsterer in nearby Killick-Claw, and Quoyle finds a job reporting the shipping news for the local weekly, the Gammy Bird (a paper that specializes in sexual-abuse stories and grisly photos of car accidents). As the long winter closes its jaws of ice, each of the Quoyles confronts private demons, reels from catastrophe to minor triumph—in the company of the obsequious Mavis Bangs; Diddy Shovel the strongman; drowned Herald Prowse; cane-twirling Beety; Nutbeem, who steals foreign news from the radio; a demented cousin the aunt refuses to recognize; the much-zippered Alvin Yark; silent Wavey; and old Billy Pretty, with his bag of secrets. By the time of the spring storms Quoyle has learned how to gut cod, to escape from a pickle jar, and to tie a true lover’s knot.
