58 pages • 1 hour read
Patrick O'BrianMaster and Commander
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1969A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Symbols & Motifs
The Ship
The ship in Master and Commander symbolically represents a living being. The Sophie is a little world, a microcosm of larger society, often compared to a single living organism or a colony of animals. Aubrey often thinks of the Sophie as a living creature, personifying the parts of the ship whenever he takes the tiller. When he watches her sailing from the shore, he feels a bond with the ship, realizing “he had had no idea how deeply he felt about his sloop: he [knows] exactly how she [will move] in—the particular creak of her mainyard in its parrel, the whisper of her rudder magnified by the sounding-board of her stern” (221). The common nautical practice of referring to ships with a feminine pronoun increases the sense of the Sophie as a living organism.
Other passages denote how the ship functions as an interconnected community, bonding all of the crew together into one unit. When the officers feel overwhelmed and sad, it impacts the other crew members as well:
[T]he Sophie was already so very much of a community that every man aboard was conscious of something out of joint […] the gloom on the quarter-deck seeped forward, reaching as far as the goat-house, the manger, and even the hawse-holes themselves (258).
This shared emotional state between all of the areas of the ship increases the impression that the ship has become a kind of living being.
From a distance, ships are often referred to as appearing similar to insect colonies, a highly interdependent community. As the Sophie prepares for a battle, she is described as “busy as a hive, watchful, prepared, bristling with pugnacity” (322). The image of the ship as a hive of bees implies that the structure itself is linked to the many creatures living within, all of whom share a common purpose and goal. By personifying the ship and hinting at how it brings together the crew, O’Brian makes it clear why Aubrey feels a strong emotional bond to the Sophie and why it is such a tragedy for her to be captured by the French.
Natural Philosophy
The motif of natural philosophy occurs throughout Master and Commander, drawing attention to the parallels between the perspective of a sailor and the perspective of a naturalist. Maturin represents the viewpoint of a natural philosopher, joining the Sophie because Aubrey persuades him that “a man-of-war is the very thing for a philosopher […] [as] there are the birds, the fishes […] the natural phenomena, the meteors, the chance of prize-money. For even Aristotle would have been moved by prize money” (38). This phrase amusingly points out that the life of a sailor in the British Navy is strangely closer to that of a scientist than it seems, involving a great deal of contact with animal species and weather phenomena. Additionally, Aubrey humorously adds that everyone is motivated by money, and even the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle would have needed money to support his scientific research.
Maturin often thinks in natural philosophical terms, using the Latin names for species and ascribing medical explanations to human behavior. For example, when Aubrey asks him what a type of mushroom that they are eating is called, he replies, “[T]hey are bolets in Catalan: but what they are called in English I cannot tell. They probably have no name—no country name, I mean, though the naturalist will always recognize them in the boletus edulis of Linnaeus” (35). For Maturin, science serves as a universalizing language that can bridge the cultural gap between sea and shore. He claims that “science is measurement—no knowledge without measurement” (380), and applies the scientific process to all aspects of life.
However, Maturin’s natural philosophy is sometimes challenging aboard the Sophie, where many crew members do not value his rationalist desire to study animals. When he attempts to bring an asp preserved in wine onto the ship for study, he finds that “at some point in very recent time a criminal hand had taken the jar, drunk up all the alcohol and left the asp dry, stranded, parched” (215). This episode humorously hints that Maturin’s worldview is not the conventional one, and that the other sailors value the asp more for the alcohol than for the animal specimen.
Music
The motif of music appears throughout Master and Commander, serving as the primary force that brings Aubrey and Maturin together as friends and metaphorically representing the harmony and discord of the sailors aboard the ship. Aubrey and Maturin meet at a concert, where music initially causes conflict between them due to Aubrey’s lack of rhythm. However, music then brings them together when they discover a shared love for playing stringed instruments, and they often enjoy performing together on the ship. During a party on shore, Aubrey, Maturin, and Mr. Brown from the shipyard play as a trio and create a harmonious and pleasant environment through the music:
[T]hey had never played all together before, had never rehearsed this particular work, and the resulting sound was ragged in the extreme; but they took immense pleasure there in the heart of it, and their audience, Mrs. Brown and a white cat, sat mildly knitting, perfectly satisfied with the performance (185).
Music is closely tied to the theme of friendship and reflects the equality in Maturin and Aubrey’s relationship.
Other characters are alienated by music. Dillon is initially offended by Aubrey singing a song offensive to the Irish. He later claims that they “know what a sad waste music is on [him]—pearls before swine” (203), and refuses to join Aubrey and Maturin for their concerts. This emphasizes the divide between Dillon and the pair. However, in his final moments, he and Maturin sing an Irish song together, suggesting that music could have brought him closer to other people.
Both Aubrey and Maturin often use music as a metaphor for social interactions. When there is conflict aboard the ship, Aubrey worries that “his tight, self-contained world was hopelessly out of tune” (257). Similarly, Maturin uses music to describe the way that different systems of law create conflict within people: “[O]ur strings were each tuned according to a completely separate system” (319). He also compares losing connection to his friends and his culture to forgetting how to play music. In his diary, Maturin records that when he first returned to Ireland, he no longer knew his native language, and that this feels just like the loss of understanding with an old friend. He recounts a story about music to symbolize this feeling: “Maimonides has an account of a lute-player who, required to perform upon some stated occasion, found that he had entirely forgot not only the piece but the whole art of playing, fingering, everything” (301). These passages exemplify how O’Brian uses the motif of music to represent the possibility of harmonious bonds between people, but also the perpetual risk of discordance and conflict.
