81 pages • 2 hours read
Paolo BacigalupiShip Breaker
Fiction | Novel | YA | Published in 2010A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Symbols & Motifs
The Sea
Much like the biblical flood, the sea in Ship Breaker destroys everything in its path; it’s an overpowering motif, swallowing land and drowning cities. Inherently dangerous, the water is also a symbol of rebirth and freedom for Nailer, which makes it a complex symbol with both positive and negative connotations. Only by submitting to its strength is Nailer able to survive and, ultimately, thrive.
Seas are alien and dangerous to humanity, but they also represent life’s origins. When the city killer storm annihilates Bright Sands in Chapter 7, it destroys most of the evidence of human industrialization, resetting the beach to its clean, original beauty. In much the same way, the Gulf waters wash Nailer clean of the oil after his near-death experience on the tanker (although the tanker poisons Nailer with a rusty shard of metal as a memento). Immersion in water often signifies symbolic death and rebirth; Nailer’s wound festers and nearly kills him, but he emerges from the bay with a new perspective on his life. The water erases his prior illusions about crew and family, allowing him to cut his ties and leave for a better life.
While the sea is chaotic and destructive, suggesting the violence of humanity’s conflict with nature, it is also a symbol of beauty and freedom. While on the Dauntless, Nailer reads a book “all about an old guy fishing on a boat” (271). This allusion to Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea is significant. The book deals with endurance and perseverance but also with submitting to the power of the sea; the old man only catches the marlin because he allows the sea to tire the fish out, and he also submits to the sea’s natural order when he stops fighting the sharks off. By the end of his journey, Nailer too must submit to the sea, learning the rhythm of the waves and submitting to the currents. In fighting the waves, he nearly drowns, but when he stills, the currents carry him and Nita “exactly where they want[] to go” (316). This suggests that in order to thrive in the new ecological order, humans must move away from the toxicity of the past ages and work with nature instead of against it.
Luck
The luck motif both helps and hinders characters’ survival in a postapocalyptic world. Luck is chance; good or bad luck befalls characters regardless of their actions. For the ship breakers, blaming luck for horrific events helps to alleviate (or at least explain) the hopelessness of their situation. For instance, the idea that Jackson Boy is unlucky obscures the reality that all the children are doing work that is inherently deadly; to earn enough money to survive, they must expose themselves to hazardous toxic fumes, unstable structures, and quotas that force them to take dangerous risks. Therefore, they ascribe accidents and illness to occasional bad luck. Blaming the misery of their lives on the Fates or chance means it is unchangeable. While it helps the residents of Bright Sands to rationalize their suffering, it does not give them the means to change their situation and denies their free will.
Good luck likewise seems random and senseless. A Lucky Strike happens to a man who then uses his wealth to sell drugs and alcohol to the residents, deepening their despair. Nailer’s father nicknames him “Lucky Boy,” but his good luck centers on finding lucky strikes that are too big for him to benefit from. Lucky Girl survives the shipwreck only to be taken prisoner twice by the murderous Richard Lopez. Good things seem to happen to bad people, while the truly deserving, such as Sadna and Pima, merely suffer. Attributing anything good to luck rather than hard work is psychologically protective because in Bright Sands, hard work does little to alleviate residents’ substandard lot in life.
Because luck is uncontrollable, Pima and Nailer recognize that they must be smart as well. They scavenge farther abroad than other members of the beach, reasoning that they will avoid competition for food by doing so. Doing so puts them in the lucky position to spot Nita’s wrecked clipper ship. It is luck that places Nailer on the Dauntless, but it is his intelligence and perseverance that gets him the job in the gear room. It is ambition and his decision to defy his destiny as a ship breaker that pushes him to learn to read, but it is luck that gives him Knot as a mentor, as it is unlikely that anyone else would have the time to teach him. Finally, luck places Nita and Richard near the Pole Star’s gear room when Nailer finds them, but it is Nailer’s decision to better himself by learning to read that allows him to finally destroy his nemesis in the gears. Luck plays a role in Nailer realizing his dreams, but relying solely on luck means denying the importance of free will.
Tattoos
Supporting the themes of family and loyalty, tattoos symbolize allegiances and worth; individuals wear tattoos to show where they belong and what type of work they can do, clans wear tattoos to show who is family and what the clan specializes in, and some of the more brutal heavies wear threatening tattoos (e.g., Richard’s dragon) to intimidate and force obedience from their underlings. In this world, the group a person belongs to denotes who they belong with; there is rarely any fraternizing between groups.
When Sloth betrays Nailer, her tattoos—her mark of belonging—are literally cut from her face. Without her tattoos, she no longer has protection on the beach, and her chances of escaping the Harvesters or other predators are very low. Richard’s tattoos identify him as a demon; dragons curl over his arms and around his neck, breathing fire and menace. Blue Eyes’ tattoos and scars show her to be a member of the Life Cult and the Harvesters. Both Richard and Blue Eyes’s tattoos signify to weaker residents that they are apex predators. Nailer’s tattoos identify him as a ship breaker to the captain on the Dauntless, and because of his markings, he must work to overcome Candless’s perceptions of ship breakers.
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