The anti-father
Richard Devine is a young man whose father is a violent man and a tyrant. One day, he strikes his wife in front of young Richard, and the mother confesses that the boy isn't even his; she had an affair with someone else. The man expels young Richard from the home and swears him out of his inheritance. This is a symbolic "fall of man" scene where Richard is sent into the chaos of the world, broken off from his family in an ultimate way; this hateful man was never Richard's father at all.
The guilt of patricide
On his way along the street, young Richard Devine sees a man lying dead in the dark. He investigates and discovers that it is none other than his true father, the man his mother claimed was his father. The police find him and arrest him for the murder, but they don't have any evidence, so they only charge him with robbing a corpse. This raises two symbolic motifs; patricide and taking something from the dead father. The first symbol is an Oedipal symbol relating to the birth of independence through painful experience; the second is a symbol akin to Virgil, because he takes something from his encounter with the father, like Aeneas does in the underworld.
The symbolic name change
The encounter with his dead father does exactly what Virgil's Aeneid suggests; it radically alters Devine's sense of identity and experience of self. No one can experience such an encounter without being transformed. This makes him spontaneously decide to change his name. No longer will he be in the quasi-divine status of childhood. He transitions out of the name "devine" and into the new identity he calls "Dawes." The birth of a new name here identifies the new realization that death is the fate of all men.
The ocean as a symbol
On land, Dawes's life seems safe and orderly. If not for the tyrannical abuse of his father, he could have expected a normal life with a job and a wife, and an inheritance to help him make his way in life financially. But now, he's poor, alone, and he has an undeserved criminal record. The land is no longer the appropriate setting, and so much of the novel takes him into the seas. On the ocean, life is chaotic, full of mutiny and harsh fates. He is beset on all sides by chaos, as the ocean surrounds the vessel, and in the end, the ocean claims him. The man dies with his wife, not in old age in a family bed, but young, in his true bed, the chaos of the seas.
Imprisonment as a symbol
The symbol that probably stands out most to Dawes in his life is the prison system that he is condemned to witness. He gets two life sentences in this book. He starts his adulthood with a near brush with prison, but escapes, only to be arrested again later, innocent once more. To him, prison is an unfortunate part of reality, but to the reader, the jail is a symbol for Dawes's condemnation to fate. The artist who wrote the novel has sovereignty to do whatever he wants with Dawes, but he allows him to sit in prison, afflicted by a man from his own family. Symbolically, the meaning is fateful; perhaps it is also an allusion to Hugo's Les Miserables.
