Student Question
What is the main problem in Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog)?
Quick answer:
The main problem of Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog), is that the men making the journey down that Thames are completely ill-equipped for roughing it. Many quotes illustrate this. One is the narrator's romantic fantasy of what boat travel will be like, under the moonlight, as "we, common-place, everyday young men enough, feel strangely full of thoughts, half sad, half sweet." Their trip will be anything but a sweet, romantic idyll.
The main problem of the book and the source of its humor lies in the way the three men are utterly ill-equipped for their boat journey down the Thames. Many paragraphs can be chosen to illustrate this theme. One is the following, showing the narrator's unrealistic fantasy before they leave that their trip will be a beautiful and romantic escape from civilization and reality:
And we sit there, by its margin, while the moon, who loves it too, stoops down to kiss it with a sister’s kiss, and throws her silver arms around it clingingly; and we watch it as it flows, ever singing, ever whispering, out to meet its king, the sea—till our voices die away in silence, and the pipes go out—till we, common-place, everyday young men enough, feel strangely full of thoughts, half sad, half sweet, and do not care or want to speak ... and the...
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poisoned sneers of artificiality had made us ashamed of the simple life we led with her, and the simple, stately home where mankind was born so many thousands years ago.
The kind of overblown rhetoric in the paragraph above shows that the narrator has no idea what he and his friends are getting into as they embark on their journey.
Another paragraph that shows the men's lack of knowledge of what they are about to encounter is below. Though the narrator realizes they would do well not to overpack for the journey, the men tend to do so and also to be unrealistic about what will be possible on a boat trip:
For clothes, George said two suits of flannel would be sufficient, as we could wash them ourselves, in the river, when they got dirty. We asked him if he had ever tried washing flannels in the river, and he replied: “No, not exactly himself like; but he knew some fellows who had, and it was easy enough;” and Harris and I were weak enough to fancy he knew what he was talking about, and that three respectable young men, without position or influence, and with no experience in washing, could really clean their own shirts and trousers in the river Thames with a bit of soap.
Throughout their journey, the travelers realize they have overestimated their wisdom about boat travel as well as their ability to rough it. Their clothes come out dirtier when they try to wash them in the Thames, forcing them to pay a washerwoman three times the ordinary price to get them clean again. They read there are ample fish to be had in the river and can see them swimming beneath the surface, but they cannot manage to catch them. Overall, the men have the humbling and comic experience of being wholly inept at functioning outside of their normally pampered world.