58 pages • 1 hour read
Patrick O'BrianMaster and Commander
Patrick O'BrianFiction | 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.
Themes
Friendship Between Equals
Master and Commander suggests that friendship between equals is the best solution to the loneliness that accompanies exceptional ability. Both Aubrey and Maturin begin the novel feeling isolated from their peers because of their rank and expertise. Aubrey is used to serving as a lieutenant, but finds the adjustment to his new rank difficult as he is no longer a part of the social world of the crew. When he enters the Sophie for the first time, he notices how the sailors act differently around him due to respect, and while he does want them to recognize his authority, he finds the experience lonely.
Aubrey conceives of this relationship like the dynamic between mortals and the Olympian Gods, conveying the large distance between a captain and his crew. Aubrey notices that when he attempts to socialize with the other officers and midshipmen, his presence disrupts the party because he outranks everyone else. When he attempts to join a gathering, he only grows lonelier because he recognizes that “he [is] an intruder: he had upset their quiet sociability, dried up the purser’s literary criticism and interrupted the chess as effectually as an Olympian thunderbolt” (160). The crew cannot relax when Aubrey is present, as they are constantly aware of his power over them. They feel the need to wait on him and entertain him, which ruins the easy camaraderie the crew share among themselves. This awkwardness means that he prefers the company of Maturin when he is aboard the ship because Maturin is highly educated and scorns deference to authority.
Maturin, as a physician and intellectual who is therefore closer to his own social status, provides Aubrey with relief from the very beginning: “[A]s he walked off to his meeting at the Crown—to his meeting with an equal—there was a little greater eagerness in his step than the mere Lieutenant Aubrey would have shown” (33). This indicates Aubrey’s shift in perspective thanks to his promotion. As a lieutenant, Maturin would have seemed superior to him, but as a master and commander, Aubrey can openly appreciate Maturin’s sophistication and intelligence. As he explores his role as captain of the Sophie, Aubrey decides that “where there [is] no equality there [is] no companionship: when a man [is] obliged to say ‘Yes sir,’ his agreement [is] of no worth even if it happened to be true.” (257). For this reason, a friendship between equals is the only antidote for Aubrey’s loneliness. Although Aubrey earns the genuine respect of his crew, he is only truly able to trust Maturin because Maturin is not beholden to his approval.
Maturin also takes comfort in his friendship with Aubrey. His work as a physician and as a naturalist results in him spending a lot of time alone or cut off from his fellow humans. Maturin initially views the ship as a place to study human behavior, rather than to forge bonds with other people. When Maturin walks beside Aubrey on the deck of the ship, he finds the sensation of the crew’s deference strange: “[I]t gave him a not altogether disagreeable sensation of waking death: either the absorbed, attentive men on the other side of the glass wall were dead, mere phantasma, or he was” (121). Although the crew teaches him about the customs of sailors and the workings of the ship, and they celebrate Maturin when he saves lives and cures illnesses, Maturin is never a true equal to the rest of the crew. Maturin is used to being ignored or being alone with only animals, and he finds it remarkable that he now has Aubrey to talk to as they both exist on the outskirts of the ship’s social world.
The only other person who comes close to this friendship is James Dillon. As someone similar to Aubrey, who shares a past with Maturin, O’Brian constantly hints that there is the potential for Dillon to join their friendship and engage with them on an equal level. Dillon expresses his personal feelings to Maturin, who tries to advise him and calm his temper. He also has a brief period of goodwill toward Aubrey, in which the two bond over battle and war. However, Dillon is unable to overcome his inner conflict, which prevents him from taking that final step. He dies in battle, never forging an equal friendship like Aubrey and Maturin’s.
Aubrey and Maturin’s friendship provides them both with emotional support throughout Master and Commander, signifying that a relationship between equals can be mutually beneficial. Each provides the other with something that they need—surgical knowledge, employment, assistance with collecting specimens or writing letters—and both receive companionship in an environment where they would otherwise be socially isolated due to their rank and abilities. Toward the end of the book, when Aubrey worries about the court-martial and his fate, Maturin keeps him company and supports him, indicating that the only true comfort in times of great stress is friendship.
The Cost of Ambition
Early on, Aubrey is established as a highly ambitious character, someone who pursues high risks for high rewards in multiple areas of his life. Aubrey’s desire to take prizes leads him to attain significant military victories, but also risks the lives of his crew, resulting in a conflict over the appropriate level of ambition.
During the Sophie’s first voyage, Aubrey’s ambition comes across as greedy and unethical. Having been tasked with protecting a merchant convoy, he grows frustrated when his orders conflict with hunting down a privateer ship. He complains that “if it had not been for that damned convoy he might have had the galley” (138), and he reacts angrily when Dillon reveals that the Norwegian merchants are still alive because that means he cannot chase down the pirates. Instead of focusing on the positive preservation of human life, he thinks only of the money he has lost: “he stumped below, £875 the poorer, and looking thoroughly sour and disagreeable” (143). This attitude leads him into conflict with Dillon, who feels it is more honorable to attack other warships rather than seeking out merchant vessels for the money. Dillon tells Maturin, “[T]here is a certain thing that jars on me—his great eagerness for prizes. The sloop’s discipline and training is more like that of a starving privateer than a King’s ship” (174). He comments that Aubrey treats the promise of fortune the way anyone else might treat a major, glorious, honorable victory. However, Maturin points out that Dillon, due to his aristocratic background, is ignoring a key motivation—Aubrey’s family poverty. Maturin points this out to Dillon, asking him “whether it is not too easy for a rich man to despise money—to mistake the real motives” (177), as a way of prompting Dillon to look at Aubrey’s choices from a different perspective.
A part of Aubrey’s ambition is motivated by his own poverty and his very real need for money. When Aubrey tells Maturin why he seeks out prizes, he admits, “I have always been poor, and I long to be rich” (148). Furthermore, Aubrey seeks advancement within the British Navy, hoping to secure his position by becoming a post-captain. He tells Maturin, “[A]t present I am called captain only by courtesy—I am dependent upon the courtesy of a parcel of damned scrubs, much as surgeons are by courtesy called Doctor” (279). Because of his family’s relatively low social and financial status, Aubrey needs to obtain money to finance more voyages because this will help him to increase his rank and give him a more stable position of authority. However, some of Aubrey’s fervent pursuit of success stems from Aubrey’s personality in and of itself. Aubrey, for instance, pursues a relationship with a married woman despite the risks it entails and the consequences he ultimately suffers from it.
Master and Commander does not neglect the biggest cost of Aubrey’s ambition: the loss of human life. After every battle, Aubrey goes to Maturin’s cabin to learn who in the crew has been injured or killed. Initially, Maturin’s medical expertise allows him to save most of his patients, even the gunner, Mr. Day, who seems impossible to heal. Aubrey always dreads discovering who has been killed during battles, worrying that the loss of good sailors will outweigh the benefits of taking a prize. However, for most of the novel, their engagements have no deaths, only minor injuries. While a few sailors die from alcohol poisoning or illness, the first causalities occur during the attack on the Cacafuego when James Dillon and Henry Ellis are killed. After this, Aubrey grapples with his simultaneous feelings of sadness and happiness:
[H]e grieved, of course he grieved, he grieved bitterly for the loss of his shipmates—would have given his right hand to save them—and mixed in his sorrow for Dillon there was a guilt whose cause and nature eluded him; but a serving officer in an active war has an intense rather than a lasting grief (338).
As the master and commander, Aubrey cannot afford to dwell on his mourning, nor he can run from every confrontation simply to avoid losing his crew. Doing so would mean no victories for the Sophie, which, in addition to leaving Aubrey dissatisfied with his accomplishments, would make Aubrey an unfit captain in the eyes of his commanding officers.
O’Brian portrays Aubrey as a concerned and empathetic captain, but his ambition and his belief in necessary sacrifice during war means that he considers some human cost acceptable in any engagement.
The Customs of Sailors Versus the Customs of Shore
Master and Commander explores the concept of the differences in culture between the sea and the shore. The narration often draws attention to the ways in which sailors, with their particular expertise, perceive the world differently. As the Sophie leaves port for the first time, its progress appears slow to a trained sailor, but unremarkable to anyone else:
The Sophie had spread her wings a little more like an unhurried dove than an eager hawk, but not so much so that the expert eyes on shore would swell upon her with disapprobation; and as for the mere landsmen, their eyes were so satiated with the coming and going of every kind of vessel that they passed over her departure with glassy indifference (66).
Aubrey often has to explain the maneuvers of ships to Maturin, which illustrates the significance of these matters to readers as well.
Maturin’s presence aboard the Sophie provides the primary mechanism for exposition on naval technology, as Maturin is unfamiliar with nautical terms and the culture of sailors. He is often surprised by customs such as the high allotment of alcohol or the cramped quarters. Initially, he considers himself unfit for the job of a naval surgeon, telling Aubrey, “To be sure, I have done a great deal of anatomical dissection, and I am not unacquainted with most of the usual chirurgical operations; but I know nothing of naval hygiene, nothing of the particular maladies of seamen…” (38). Aubrey assures him that most ship’s surgeons know even less than he does, suggesting that what passes for a surgeon on shore is far above the level of a man who is called a surgeon at sea.
Maturin’s lack of knowledge is not medical, but rather linguistic. While he is proficient with multiple languages and with Latinate scientific names, he often confuses the terms for parts of the ship and even for the ranks of officers. The technical jargon for different types of boats and different ranks on the ships is often ambiguous and used inconsistently by sailors, confusing the more scientifically minded Maturin. The sailors assure him that in the Navy “you may call yourself what you please, so long as you do your duty” (151). When Maturin mistakenly assumes that the ship’s “master” outranks the “captain,” Aubrey is stunned:
[I]f Stephen had called the Sophie’s stem her stern, or her trick her keel, he would have understood the situation directly; but that Stephen should confuse the chain of command, […] so subverted the natural order, so undermined the sempiternal universe, that for a moment his mind could hardly encompass it (122).
For Aubrey and the others who spend their lives at sea, such knowledge is second nature.
While Maturin gains an understanding of the technical terminology as he acclimates, he is slower to comprehend the distinctive cultural norms and the ambiguous terms for people in the British Navy. He notes certain aspects of sea life that stand out to him, such as the idea that a duel cannot be held on a ship, only on land. In this way, despite the fact that the crew respects Maturin and interact with him on friendly terms, Maturin is constantly positioned as an outsider. No matter how much time he spends aboard the Sophie, he is always more comfortable on land, where the world behaves in a way he understands much more clearly.
Likewise, Aubrey seems to have trouble switching back and forth between how he acts at sea and how he acts on land. O’Brian makes this struggle clear when he writes that Aubrey takes time to adjust how he walks once he’s off the ship, as he is so unused to solid ground. This also extends to his mannerisms and behaviors. When he attends a dinner at Captain Harte’s house, he offends the company by telling lewd and gross stories of their voyage that are not socially appropriate for the more refined setting. Aubrey rarely enjoys his time on land, and though he values Maturin’s company and acknowledges the alternative perspective he provides on certain matters, he is always happier to return to his domain—the ocean.
This divide between land and sea provides a primary example of the multiple types of laws that Maturin claims are responsible for much of human unhappiness. The need to constantly modulate and shift behavior in order to fit in causes both Maturin and Aubrey trouble and confusion. Despite this, the two do their best to compromise: Aubrey is still beholden to his higher-ranking officers, whom he often meets on land, while Maturin values both the money and the experiences he gains aboard the Sophie and thus willingly endures the discomfort of unfamiliarity.
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