Ultramarine: Analysis of Major Characters
"Ultramarine" is a novel that centers on Eugene Dana Hilliot, a young man navigating the complexities of identity during his first voyage as a deckhand. Hilliot, who is of Norwegian and English descent, experiences feelings of sensitivity and alienation among his working-class shipmates. He grapples with an identity crisis that reflects the author’s own experiences, particularly during a journey to China in 1927. Throughout the narrative, Hilliot's internal monologues and dreams reveal his struggle for acceptance as both an ordinary seaman and an extraordinary individual.
Key characters alongside Hilliot include Andy, the ship's charismatic cook, who serves as a rival and father figure, and Norman, the cabin boy who embodies a sense of normalcy and camaraderie. Janet, Hilliot's childhood love, is another significant character, representing Hilliot’s nostalgic past and ideals. The interactions among these characters contribute to Hilliot's journey of self-discovery and the forging of his identity as a storyteller and expatriate. As the story unfolds, themes of belonging, youthful desires, and personal transformation are explored through Hilliot's experiences at sea and in port.
Ultramarine: Analysis of Major Characters
Author: Malcolm Lowry
First published: 1933; revised, 1962
Genre: Novel
Locale: Tsjang-Tsjang harbor, China, and Merseyside, England
Plot: Social realism
Time: c. 1927
Eugene Dana Hilliot, the novel's center of consciousness, an upper-middle-class youth, half-Norwegian and half-English, taking his first voyage as a deckhand. Sensitive, creative, out of place, and out of his class among the crew, Hilliot is the only character to be described in any detail. He has an identity problem that mirrors that of the author himself, whose own 1927 voyage to China Hilliot takes. Even his name is a compendium of references to the author's literary influences: Eugene O'Neill, Richard Henry Dana, and T. S. Eliot (the crew pronounce Hilliot's name “Illiot”). Hilliot wants both to be accepted as an “ordinary seaman” and to be extraordinary; at the age of nineteen, he has left boyhood behind but has yet to enter into adulthood. The voyage, his all-night “binge” ashore at Tsjang-Tsjang, his challenge to Andy, and his acceptance as part of the group will allow him to come to terms with the bourgeois Merseyside past of which he has freed himself, his schoolboy love, and his sexual urges, and to forge for himself an identity as a spinner of yarns and an expatriate (like his creator). Much of the novel is occupied with his interior monologues and dreams.
Andy, the “chinless wonder,” the ship's cook and focus of its social life, a dominating personality. The most memo-rable of the novel's sketchily drawn supporting players, tattooed and sensual, working-class Andy is important not for what he is but for what he represents: a rival and alter-ego (he spends the night ashore with the prostitute Hilliot had fancied), a model for selfhood, and a father figure (he calls Hilliot “son” at the close of the novel) who can be left behind and surpassed.
Norman, the cabin boy, another rival and model. Easygoing, plucky, and eminently “normal,” Norman performs the bathetically “heroic” act of rescuing a pigeon from atop the mainmast that Hilliot feels he should have attempted, the prize being the crew's applause and acceptance. He accompanies Hilliot on his binge and tour of the port sights: the cinema, the anatomical museum, and the bars. Concern for Norman (he loses his pigeon) draws Andy and Hilliot together.
Janet, Hilliot's innocent schoolboy love, to whom most of his monologues are addressed. Something of a cardboard cutout (the hometown madonna to the whore with whom Hilliot had contemplated losing his virginity), Janet is a soft, sweet, idealized representative of Hilliot's childhood values. His good-bye to her in Merseyside, finally related near the novel's close, has proved a decisive moment in Hilliot's life. He receives a letter from her only to lose it in a bar to an un-comprehending German, Popplereuter, who later forwards it. At the novel's close, Hilliot is mentally drafting his reply: an account of himself and his changes.