The Devil Inside that Won't Be Caged or Fixed by Words: Fluidity and Ethics in Ian McGuire's The North Water
Abstrakt
In Ian McGuire's novel The North Water (2016), Patrick Sumner, a young medical doctor recently dismissed from the British Army with his reputation and professional prospects in ruins, accepts a poorly-paid position as a surgeon on a whaling ship in his attempt to flee from his past and his troubled conscience. However, contrary to his expectations, in the Arctic Circle he faces an ordeal far more demanding than anything he has hitherto endured in the form of the harpooner Henry Drax, a dangerous psychopath who is ready to abuse and murder anyone who is an obstacle to the satisfaction of his brutish physical needs.
Confronted with violence and cruelty beyond understanding, within the fluid framework of the distorted ethical norms and values of the heterogeneous crew the embittered Sumner is gradually forced to abandon his protective shell of resigned indifference and reassess the moral stances and responsibilities of a civilised person when faced with human wickedness. This paper argues that using the background of the declining Victorian whaling industry, The North Water follows the tradition of fiction centred on a fallible, transgressing hero who balances, under extreme and volatile circumstances, on the blurred border between good and evil.
The novel can thus be read as a compelling response to Conradian ethical queries, particularly regarding the relationship between "I" and the "other" which, though the story is set in 1859, resonates with discourse concerning such ethical issues in the present-day world.