Proulx may have had these dark intentions (just as she may also have simply said she did on a whim, as interview-subjects sometimes do), but ultimately that might not matter. But at this stage, I'm afraid I have to bring in Barthes and the death of the author. So the whole thing is smoke and mirrors? Proulx knew all along that Quoyle was still bound to suffer? It's a possible reading. It's a happy ending that isn't really happy … " Provocatively, the author claimed that this passage merely gives "the illusion of the happy ending. Later, when I listened to Proulx give a rare interview about The Shipping News with the BBC's James Naughtie, another possibility presented itself. And that, rather beautifully, Proulx seems to have left it down to her readers to decide whether or not they believe in such miracles. That it would be, in fact, miraculous if he escaped further trials. It was only after a few moments reflection that it began to dawn on me that she might be saying that Quoyle's chances for painless happiness are slim. It seemed to me there was something untrue there, some unwarranted jauntiness. For a brief moment, I felt almost as let down as I did when staggering to the end of Cormac McCarthy's The Road. Which is strange, because the first time I read them, I thought that Proulx had copped for the happy ending. This time around, the words struck me as pessimistic. I also started feeling sure that water can't ever be older than light. I remembered, for instance, that the "bird with broken neck" earlier on in the story didn't really fly away.
What do you make of that? Even as I typed the passage out I changed my mind again. And it may be that love sometimes occurs without pain or misery. As Pamish and SignificantOther suggest, this paragraph is so good it's worth quoting in full:įor if Jack Buggit could escape from the pickle jar, if a bird with a broken neck could fly away, what else might be possible? Water may be older than light, diamonds crack in hot goat's blood, mountaintops give off cold fire, forests appear in mid-ocean, it may happen that a crab is caught with the shadow of a hand on its back, that the wind be imprisoned in a bit of knotted string. At this point – spoiler alert! – if you haven't yet finished the book, you should probably look away now.
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