Tourists Character Analysis

In addition to being an active fishing village—in fact it is implied because it is a picturesque and active fishing village—the Cape Breton community where the narrator grows up is also a tourist definition. The tourists rent cabins that overlook the village from a high hill, and often frequent the American-owned seafood restaurant in the harbor where the narrator’s sisters go to work. The tourists are always referred to as a group. One particular group of tourists asks the narrator’s father to take them out on a boat voyage, which he does. Later, they invite him back to their rented cabins, where he gets drunk and sings old sea shanties and the war songs of his ancestors. The tourists pay him and record his songs (although the narrator’s mother won’t touch the payment). That winter, they send the narrator’s father a postcard where they call him “Our Ernest Hemingway” with “Our” underlined. In their interactions with the village and with the narrator’s father the tourists come to represent the complicated relationship between the modern outside world and the traditional world: how the outside world craves the “authenticity” of tradition and seeks to experience it through tourism, but in doing so objectifies, claims ownership over, and condescends to those traditions; how the traditions of the fishing village attract outside attention (and money from tourists), but in doing so lead to change that undermines the tradition, underscored by the fact that the sisters end up marrying some of the tourists.