The Boat
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About the author Alistair Macleod, he was born in North Battleford, Saskatchewan in 1936, but by the age of ten had returned with his family to their farm in Cape Breton. After completing high school, MacLeod attended teachers college in Truro and then taught school. A specialist in British literature of the nineteenth century, MacLeod taught English as a professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Windsor to this day. His first published short story, “The Boat” (1968), just like a portraiture of his own real life.
As a work of mourning, “The Boat” is structured around the narrators grief for the loss of his father. The narrator explores his relationship with his father, mother and ancestral tradition through telling a story; these relationships are full of conflict . The narrator documents a period in his life where he must choose between upholding old beliefs and forging his own path in life. In the text the narrator has made clear career and lifestyle choices (far away from the traditional world of his youth), but he has not come to terms with the significance of his fathers passing, and he still feels a fundamental unease with his life.
“The Boat” begins in the setting of winter morning,”when I awake at four oЎЇclock in the morning with the terrible fear that I have overslept [and] that my father is waiting for me ” (105) has described the narrators feelings of being “foolishly alone” and the absence of his father is underscored here. The narrator describes his frequent early morning awakenings where he faces “the terrible fear ” (105) in a manner that suggests an action that has become reflexive after years and years of constant early mornings to go fishing with his father and the other men: “There are times when I am half out of bed and fumbling for socks and mumbling for words before I realize that I am foolishly alone, that no one waits at the base of the stairs and no boat rides restlessly in the waters of the pier” (105).
The narrator feels that ÐŽoIt [is]very much braver to spend a life doing what you really donot want rather than selfishly following forever your own dreams and inclinationsÐŽ±(139) present his fatherЎЇs philosophy of life. He had a dream to go to university, but for the whole familyЎЇs life, he had to sacrificed himself as a fisherman even though he ÐŽohad