The Title
The title of the novel works on both a literal and figurative level. The narrative does actually take place aboard a ship, but the author has clearly indicated that ship is also intended to be read as metaphor. The novel is constructed in allegorical terms with the vessel symbolizing, in the words of Porter herself, "the ship of this world on its voyage to eternity." Therefore, the fools are metaphorically a cross-section of the population with the ship a symbolic stand-in for the entire planet.
The Opening Line
The novel commences with a metaphor about the port from which the titular ship departs:
“August, 1931. The port town of Veracruz is a little purgatory between land and sea for the traveler, but the people who live there are very fond of themselves and the town they have helped to make.”
It is an appropriate literary choice for an opening line since everything that follows can be read on two levels, one of which is as allegory in which the events and characters metaphorical or symbolic representations of something larger in meaning and broader in context. If one takes the metaphorical indication of the ship leaving port from a purgatory literally, then the allegorical intention becomes even clearer; aside from transporting fools, this is also a ship of the damned.
David and Jenny
David and Jenny are a young American, both artists, who seem eternally locked in the sparring of a love/hate relationship. They almost always seem to be about to start fighting, already engaged in a quarrel or separated from each other following an argument. Equally passionate about each other and passionate about finding faults with each other, their relationship comes to seem almost to have an inevitability about it that seems like the living hell of repetition. Or, as the narrator observes:
“The quarrel between them was a terrible treadmill they mounted together and tramped round and round until they were wearied out or in despair.”
Like a treadmill, the exercise seems futile in the sense that they never seem to make any progress and merely wind up right back where they started.
The Captain
The Captain of this ship of fools is a pompous authoritarian rightly deserving of the title king of fools. He plays a central part in the activity of others primarily because jockey for position and the right to sit at his table during dinner. As a potentate overwhelmed with himself and blissfully unaware that any respect accorded him is to the position rather than the man, he holds a starkly unambiguous views befitting a character in an allegory:
“He knew well what human trash his ship—all ships—carried to and from all the ports of the world: gamblers, thieves, smugglers, spies, political deportees and refugees, stowaways, drug peddlers, all the gutter-stuff of the steerage moving like plague rats from one country to another, swarming and ravening and undermining the hard-won order of the cultures and civilizations of the whole world.”
The Closing
The novel ends as somewhat as it began, with a metaphorical reference to a location. The ship of fools departed from a purgatory in Mexico and arrives in Germany two years before Hitler’s Nazi Party rises to power.
“Among them, a gangling young boy, who looked as if he had never had enough to eat in his life, nor a kind word from anybody, and did not know what he was going to do next, stared with blinded eyes, his mouth quivering while he shook the spit out of his trumpet, repeating to himself just above a whisper, “Grüss Gott, Grüss Gott,” as if the town were a human being, a good and dear trusted friend who had come a long way to welcome him.”
