Model of Titanic

The Model of Titanic is a completed model ship built by Louis Creed, one of several large-scale models he constructed during his hobby phases, which he keeps on the shelves of his university office as a display of his meticulous craftsmanship and as a marker of his personal identity apart from his medical career.

Identity and Background

Louis Creed had been model-crazy since his tenth year, beginning with a World War I Spad that his Uncle Carl bought him. He worked his way through most of the Revell airplanes and moved on to bigger and better things in his teens and twenties, passing through a boats-in-bottles phase, a war-machines phase, and even a phase in which he built guns so realistic it was hard to believe they wouldn't fire. Over the last five years or so before moving to Ludlow, his focus had been on the big cruise ships. The Model of Titanic, along with a model of the Lusitania, sat on the shelves at his university office, while the Andrea Doria, completed just before they left Chicago, was displayed on the mantelpiece in their living room.

Role in Louis's Life and Character

The model represents a sustained, meticulous hobby that Louis pursued across decades, one that his wife Rachel viewed with a wifely indulgence that held, he supposed, some elements of contempt. Even after ten years of marriage, she probably thought he would grow out of it. Louis himself reflected that perhaps some of this attitude came from her father, Irwin Goldman, who believed just as much now as at the time Louis and Rachel had married that he had gotten an asshole for a son-in-law. Louis mused that Rachel might be right, that he might just wake up one morning at the age of thirty-seven, put all these models up in the attic, and take up hang gliding. The model thus serves as a quiet emblem of Louis's private, methodical nature and his resistance to the professional and familial pressures that define his adult life.

Thematic Significance

The Model of Titanic, as a completed object of patient assembly, stands in contrast to the chaos and disintegration that overtake Louis's life after the family moves to Ludlow. Its presence on his office shelf—a finished, orderly artifact—represents a world of rational control and predictable outcomes that the novel systematically dismantles. The model's subject, the famously doomed ocean liner, also carries an ironic resonance: like the ship itself, Louis's carefully constructed life is heading toward a catastrophic collision that no amount of meticulous planning can avert. The model is a silent witness to the gulf between the orderly world Louis tries to maintain and the dark, irrational forces that ultimately overwhelm him.