The Boat

How is The Boat reflective of the context it is written in?(

The author of the boat is 20th century Canadian writer Alistair MacLeod who grew up in the
Cape Breton region of Nova Scotia, a rugged terrain that has direct access to the ocean and a
business and community culture that is primarily composed of tight-knit families. This tends to
be the location and landscape upon which the author bases the majority of his works such as
“The Boat.” He often draws upon childhood experiences in his works. In particular, Macleod’s
relationship with his own fisherman father is a primary inspiration for “The Boat.” His childhood
also inspired his preoccupation with the everyday lives of physical labourers such as farmers
and fishermen; such as the physical repercussions of such kinds of work and the resilience that
emerges from them. Macleod was a descendent of Scottish immigrants who were out-priced by
wealthy land-owners in the 19th century; this partly inspires (along with his personal
experiences in Cape Breton) his exploration between the tensions of the farmers of Cape
Breton and new monopolizing companies trying to intrude on their businesses, in other words,
the conflict between tradition and the emerging modernity. His Scottish heritage also inspired
the unique type of story-telling exemplified in “The Boat” in which Macleod draws upon oral
traditions to evoke the dynamics between what is ostentatious and what is kept silent in his
piece to leave an audience with a deeper, innate understanding of his work.

How has MacLeod represented the local and traditional community? How are particular
characters representative of the local?(
MacLeod represents the local and traditional community as a distinct group of people with
particular values and opinions that are upheld by the community. The local and traditional
community are depicted generally as a tight-knit group of people who are set on the traditions of
the past, however certain individuals within the community stray from these values and beliefs
interested in the outside world. One character that embodies this yearning for knowledge and
the outside world is the father, however being the only son in his family he has the pressure to
continue the tradition of fishing and he is unable to pursue his learning and exploration of the
outside world, this desire remaining as a fantasy. The quote describing the father's body "[has]
never been intended for a fisherman…" highlights how the father is forced to live as a fisherman
despite his desire to do otherwise. His daughters on the other hand developed a desire for
knowledge and the outside world when growing up and read their father’s books shown in ‘by
the ninth or tenth grade my sisters one by one discovered my father's bedroom… She would go
with the ideal hope of imposing order or with the morere practical objective of emptying the
ashtray, and later she would be found spellbound by the volume in her hand.’. The daughters
love for outside world didn’t remain as a wish as they quickly found jobs as waiter and ‘all of
them eventually went to work as summer waitresses in the Sea Food Restaurant’ and they left
their town ‘to New York with the young men they met during the summers and later married in
those- far away cities.’ Despite many people appreciating the outside world and leaving their
homes to pursue their desires the traditional people remained adamant about sticking to
tradition, a character that embodies this is the mother. In response to her daughter reading
books she says ‘take your nose out of that trash and come do your work’ and ‘In the next world
God will see to those who waste their loves reading useless books when they should be about
their work’ showing the somewhat close-mindedness of the people in the town who refuse to
progress and stick to tradition.

How has MacLeod represented the global influences present within the local
community?
MacLeod has represented the global influences through the tensions between the local
community and the tourists. The mother’s possessive and territorial attitude towards the
narrator’s sisters demonstrates her refusal to accept anything that symbolises global influences.
She hates the arrangement of the sisters’ summer jobs at a big American-owned seafood
restaurant that draws in tourists and the repetition in “She said the restaurant was not run by
“our people”, and “our people” did not eat there, and that it was run by outsiders for outsiders”,
reveals the refusal to accept that her daughters are accepting the influence of the global. Even
when the sisters “bought my mother a great many clothes of the type she was very fond of… but
she locked them all in trunks and refused to wear any of them”. The mother’s rejection of any
new, global ideas highlight her bitterness of the inevitable erosion of the sister’s way of
traditional life and loss of enduring tradition Her rejection of the tourists reflects the rest of the
local community’s refusal to adopt any global influences as the big commercial fishing boats
have tried but failed to move into the area, because they keep finding “their buoys cut adrift and
their gear lost and destroyed”. These global influences within the local community were met by
resistance from the locals, conveying the rejection of anything that threatens traditions. This
territorial fisherman withstand the onslaught of commercial trawlers and ‘twice they have gone
away” because they know that the “grounds are sacred. Contrarily, the father accepts global
influences as it is a way for him to escape the confinements of the local community’s tradition
but he is ostracised by the tourists. The tourists, who regard the father as a Gaelic relic and
sight-seeing object of interest, with the visual imagery of the “taken-in-Cuba pictures of
Hemingway” sent by the tourists to the father, reinforce his incongruity and sense of otherness
in the presence of global influences. When the father sings for hours, he turns his back on the
sea, “which was behind him”. Furthermore, the visual imagery of the father’s “bulky fisherman’s
clothes were too big for the green and white lawn chair in which he sat, and his rubber boots
seemed to take up all of the well-clipped grass square” highlight the father’s symbolic alienation
from the direct global influence of the tourists, representing the inability of his escape from his
life of traditions.

How are particular characters representative of the global?(

MacLeod represents the shifting interests of the sisters to reveal the global influence on them
and their removal from the local community. The mother’s stubbornness of her traditions
refused any interactions with tourists and the global, creating tensions between the community
and the global claiming that the sisters are “none of them are interested in any of the right
things”. The sisters’ transformed global embodiment threatens to introduce inconstancy that
unsettles her routine and hence her secure sense of place. The father is also a representation
of a failed dream to be more global and escape the confinements of the local traditions. The
seafaring represents what is incomplete in the father’s life and “there were many things wrong
with all of us and all our lives” of the local community. The bitter sense of disappointment the
father projected onto the landscape of the sea symbolises his desire to be removed from the
local as the father “never really loved it” looks at the sea “in hatred… and in love”. And the father
encourages the sisters to embrace the global and to seek a life outside the haven of the home
to encourage them to diverge from his mistakes of a failed dream. However, the mother blames
the father and she hopes he’ll be “satisfied when they come home knocked up and you’ll have
had your way”, demonstrating her anger at the father for kindling a sense of hope that cannot be
fulfilled by the bitter-sweet rhythms of a fisherman’s life. The sense of loss in “My mother had
each of her daughters for fifteen, then lost them for two and finally forever” reaffirms her fears of
the global that disrupts her secure routine of tradition.

How does MacLeod use the seasons and the time of day to convey meaning? Consider
when the memories of his past haunt him the most and his means of coping with them.
In “The Boat”, Macleod predominantly switches between the two seasons, Winter and Summer.
Summer is commonly associated with the narrator’s mother’s life, whilst Winter is related to the
father. The mother grows “miraculous gardens and magnificent flowers”. These activities such
as growing flowers and planting vegetables form a part of the mother’s life and represent the
enjoyable and positive moments of her life. This is starkly contrasted to the only reference of her
to winter, which symbolises the coming of her mother’s death in, “[she] looks through her lonely
window onto the ice of winter”. The winter here is used to represent the decaying and
deteriorating nature of the mother. The word “lonely” emphasises that her stubbornness for her
children to keep tradition and become fishermen has led to her own lonely life and has
tormented her own children’s life. In comparison, only winter is used when referring to the father
such as “with blue eyes flashing like clearest ice beneath the snow that was his hair.” This is to
represent the fragile nature of the father, as the constant conflict between the father and mother
ultimately results in him taking his own life. 4:00am symbolises the time in which the fisherman
must wake up to catch fish in the morning. The father, in a way, dislikes this time period, as it is
a time where his son would experience being a fisherman, and perhaps pursue a future career
in the subject; he would rather them experience freedom and lead a future of their own interests.
This clashes with the mother’s opinions, who would rather them pursue the traditional fishermen
career. This “time” is repeated throughout the entire piece, as it is a constant memory that
haunts him of his experiences as a fisherman.

How do the rooms within the narrator’s childhood home operate on a symbolic level?(
Macleod utilizes the description of the rooms within the narrator’s family home to symbolise the
personalities and the people that reside within the rooms. The quote ‘The kitchen was shared by
all of us and was a buffer zone between the immaculate order of ten other rooms and the
disruptive chaos of the single room that was my father’s’ clearly shows how corresponding
rooms in the house reflect the people who reside in them. The fathers ‘room of disorder and
disarray being separated from the rest of the house, which is kept clean and orderly due to the
mother, which also symbolises the split between the mother and father. The mothers orderly
personality is shown in ‘My mother ran her house as our brother ran their boats. Everything was
clean and spotless and in order.’ contrasting to the father's room description ‘It always looked
rumpled and unmade ’. The quote ‘magazines and books covered the bureau and competed
with the clothes for domination of the chair ’, which not only reflects the messiness of the father
but also how his dream to be more educated and knowledgeable is pushed aside for his work.
The lack of description of the daughters' rooms can also represent their absence in the
household, with them leaving soon after they found employment outside of their community.

What relationship exists between the father and the sea? In what ways does MacLeod
construct this connection?(
Macleod depicts the relationship between father and the ocean to be deeply interconnected as
the ocean becomes both the basis of the father’s identity and the ultimate arbiter of the
patriarch’s unfortunate death. In particular, the symbolic boat is representative of their close
relationship as demonstrated through the epistrophe “ ‘How did you like the boat?” “Were you
afraid in the boat?” “Did you cry in the boat?” They repeated “the boat” at the end of all their
questions” which demonstrates how the boat is deeply interlocked with his identity and
experiences. Similarly, by naming the boat after his wife, “Jenny Lynn had been my mother’s
maiden name and the boat was called after her as another link in the chain of tradition” Macleod
demonstrates how the boat, and similarly the ocean, extends over to the father’s personal life. It
is the ocean however that kills the father, as the deep connection extends even further into
disturbing territory. The pathetic fallacy in the description of the ocean as turbulent “On
November twenty-first the waves of the grey Atlantic are very high and the waters are very cold”
indicates this sudden unfortunate change in the relationship as the connection becomes
dangerous for the father. The dark irony in how the “father, like your uncles and all the men that
form your past, cannot swim a stroke” despite being a man so closely involved with the water
adds a further tragic element to this doomed relationship. Even after the father’s death the
ocean still becomes more interlocked with his existence, “There was not much left of my father,
physically, as he lay there with the brass chains on his wrists and the seaweed in his hair” as
the seaweed, symbolic of the entrapping ocean, pervades and becomes one with his corpse,
and subsequently, his entire existence.