The Devil Inside that Won't Be Caged in or Fixed by Words: Fluidity and Ethics in Ian McGuire's The North Water
Abstract
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. Though McGuire acknowledges primarily the inspiration by Herman Melville and Cormac McCarthy, this paper argues that in ethical terms the novel responds to Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness, pushing the protagonist's relationship to the other to an extreme by making this other an embodiment of pure evil.