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Many adults mature and look back to their childhoods with fond, adoring eyes. Some, however, have trouble facing the past. Haunted by the demons from his youth, the narrator of Alistair MacLeod's short story "The Boat" attempts to relay his message to the world in hopes of mental freedom. The piece opens with images from an insomniac narrator. MacLeod, modeling his writing with Gaelic oral tradition, takes the reader into the narrator's past with his descriptive first person narrative. He introduces the ideas imprisonment associated with guilt and tradition through images of the mother, father, and the narrator.
"When we returned to the house everyone made a great fuss over my precious excursion….They repeated "the boat" at the end of all their questions and I knew it must be important to everyone" (MacLeod 107). The young narrator faces the predicament of tradition in his society. His mother, a New England Puritan, forces her beliefs upon her children about working and living by the sea. Her responsibilities lie in maintaining an orderly household and to keep the family together. The mother's heritage relies on the sea. "My mother was of the sea as were all her people and her horizons were the very literal ones she scanned with her dark and fearless eyes" (MacLeod 10). When her daughters choose another path away from their assumed birthright, she disowns them, their new husbands, and her grandchildren. The narrator later decides to choose education over the sea and the mother comments "I never thought a son of mine would choose useless books over the parents that gave him life" (MacLeod 11). The son tackles the reality that in order to make his mother proud and to continue tradition, he must give up the literature he loves. The mother, stubborn and proud, cares of nothing but her beloved sea. This idea bothers the narrator, partially driving him to his personal plague of restlessness. However, the mother tries her best throughout the story to keep her family together and does not realize she tears them apart with her ideals.
In contrast to the mother, the father embraces a passion for literature and continues to uphold nautical work only for the money. Unhappy with his profession, the insomniac father reads all night and clutters his room with the objects he loves the most.
Magazines and books covered the bureau and competed with the clothes for the domination of the chair. They further overburdened the heroic little table and lay top the radio. They filled a baffling and unknowable cave beneath the bed, and in the corner by the bureau they spilled from the walls and grew up from the floor…. He never seemed to sleep, only to doze, and the light shone constantly from his window to the sea. MacLeod 110-111
Yet, tradition also stains his father. Being a gentleman of Scottish descent, he does not leave his girlfriend when he impregnates her. Instead, he marries the traditional woman and settles down to become, to his disgust, a fisherman. The father has feelings of duty which imprison him to a life of the sea, although his body hardly handles the work. "He burned and reburned over and over again and his lips still cracked so that they bled when he smiled, and his arms, especially the left, still broke out into the oozing salt-water boils as they had ever since I was a child…" (MacLeod 11). Not wanting his son to follow in his footsteps, he asks the son to reconsider when he suggests on helping the family business. "I am not telling you to do anything," he said softly, "only asking you" (MacLeod 11). The father's feelings of duty towards family then brush onto the son, for he agrees to stay only until the father can fish no longer. After a few months, the father has an accident and falls off the boat, never to see his family again. Some argue the accident as suicide, but "sacrifice" better describes the incident. The father knows the son will remain on the boat with him until he quits his profession, for the fishing business requires two men. No grown man wants to see his son put his life on hold for the betterment of himself. The young narrator, willing to put his life on hold for his father and tradition, subconsciously persuades his father to fall into the sea. Unselfishly, the father jumps into the sea as a loving sacrifice to his son's future. However, he does not realize the grotesque images he will leave behind for his son to ponder.
The sea haunts the son. He, like his father, troubles over regrets with the sea in his older age. Staying alone at night with his internal haunting silence remains an impossibility for the narrator. His mother disowns him, for after the father dies, he stops fishing. "And it is not an easy thing to know that your mother looks upon the sea with love and on you with bitterness because one has been so constant and the other so true" (MacLeod 15). He desires to move on, but the images of his father and the harsh words of his mother still ring in his ears.
But neither is easy to know that your father was found on November twenty-eighth, ten miles to the north and wedged between two boulders at the base of the rock-strewn cliffs where he had been hurled and slammed so many times. His hands were shredded ribbons as were his feet which had lost their boots to the suction of the sea, and his shoulders came apart in our hands when we tried to move him from the rocks. And the fish had eaten his testicles and the gulls had pecked out his eyes and the white-green stubble of his whiskers had continued to grow in death, like the grass on graves, upon the purple, bloated mass that was his face. 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. MacLeod 15
The phantoms of the sea disturb his dreams and shatter his soul daily. The narrator writes this story in hopes to free his mind from the heartache and guilt the sea has brought him. Unfortunately, the sea and its memory will remain a large part of his life for which he could never look upon without regret. The choices he makes for his future leads him to suffer relentlessly. The son faces imprisonment with the loss of his mother for choosing education over the beloved sea and from the images of his father's death.
The mother, father, and son all have various reasons for their imprisonment in MacLeod's "The Boat." Shadowed by the past and burdened by her responsibility to uphold the sea life, the mother struggles with her family and their desire to move from their home. The father attempts to allow his children to choose their own paths, but strongly advices his son, the narrator, not to choose his future for any person but himself. Haunted by these conflicting images from his past, the narrator remains imprisoned only to write this story in hopes to fill his emotional void. Through MacLeod's strong first person narrative, the reader experiences the emotional attachment some of the characters feel towards family, tradition, duty, and guilt.
Works Cited
MacLeod, Alistair. The Lost Salt Gift of Blood. Toronto McClelland & Stewart Limited, 18.
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