Themes
Key
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Boat, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Cultural Heritage, Tradition, and Change
Generational Differences and Inheritances
Duty and Sacrifice
Time, Loss, Memory
Summary
Analysis
The narrator recalls how he sometimes wakes up at 4 a.m., afraid that he has overslept and that someone is waiting for him: either his father in another room or men standing outside, stomping around in the cold and throwing small rocks against his window. When this happens, the narrator is already getting out of bed and looking for his clothes before he realizes that he’s alone, that his father and the men aren’t there, and that there isn’t any boat docked at the pier.
The opening paragraph of the story blurs the lines between past and present: the narrator gets confused and thinks he is an adolescent again. This blurring communicates that even though he is now a middle-aged college professor as he tells this story, he continues to be haunted by his memories of when he was a boy living in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia. The time 4 a.m. is significant because it’s when the men of his village used to go out to the boats to prepare to fish—this time will recur throughout the story. These patterns of when to wake up have endured in the narrator, even though he is a long time gone from his former home.
Themes
When the narrator wakes up like this, next to his overflowing ashtray, he thinks of death and is afraid, so he splashes his face with water, then walks a mile to a local restaurant that’s open all night. In the winter, this walk is so cold that by the time the narrator gets to the restaurant, he has tears in his eyes. The waitress usually comments on the tears, saying it must be extremely cold, and the narrator agrees.
The ashtray is a clear metaphor for death, since it is a graveyard for the “corpses” of old cigarettes. The ashtray also connects the narrator to his father, who also used to smoke, showing a bad habit that was inherited between generations. The bleakness of the scene, including the cold and the tears in the narrator’s eyes, foreshadow that the memories he has about his father and his old life will not end happily. The narrator may be depressed—later in the story, the narrator’s father will himself have what seems to be a prolonged episode of depression.
Themes
The narrator makes small talk with the handful of people who are always in the restaurant until the sun comes up. He drinks bitter coffee, then leaves before the morning crowds get there because he teaches at a university in the Midwest and doesn’t want to be late. He knows then that his day will pass as usual and that the memories of the boat that wake him up at night are “only shadows and echoes,” something from a time long passed.
MacLeod continues to paint a bleak scene, with “bitter” coffee and memories that appear as “shadows and echoes.” One of the reasons why the narrator is so disturbed by his memories is that they remind him of his own mortality. The presence of other patrons in the restaurant suggests that the dark feelings the narrator feels are universal, but notably the patrons don’t discuss these feelings—they make small talk instead. The story itself seems to be a way to communicate deep feelings that people themselves do not casually share between each other.
Themes
The narrator jumps back in time to his very first memories of the boat. His first memory as a child is of his father in big rubber boots, with a face full of stubble, smelling and tasting of salt, with wild, white hair. On his first short ride in the boat, at a very young age, the narrator rides on his father’s shoulders. After docking, the narrator and his father return home and everyone makes a big deal about the narrator’s first trip. They ask lots of questions that end with the words “the boat,” so the narrator learns it must be something that’s important to all of them
“The Boat” is a frame story, and this is the point where the story transitions from the outside frame which takes places in the Midwest in the present when the narrator is middle-aged, to the middle part of the story, which takes place many years earlier in the Nova Scotia fishing village where the narrator grew up. This scene introduces the most important character in the narrator’s recollections—the father—showing him when he was relatively young and in his prime. It also introduces the titular boat, which is central to the narrator’s family’s way of life.
Themes
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The narrator jumps to his first memory of his mother. He remembers her as also being obsessed with “the boat,” doing the tasks necessary to support the narrator’s father’s work as a fisherman, like making food and fixing clothes. She often asked her husband “Well, how did things go in the boat today?” which is also the first question the narrator himself remembers asking.
The narrator’s mother has a strong connection to the boat, which in turn demonstrates her strong commitment to the family’s traditional way of life. Her devotion to helping with the boat and the father’s work as a fisherman shows her capability and strength of character, but it also hints at her singular focus and stubbornness—she is only in the boat and this fishing life.
Themes
The narrator describes the boat: it is a “Cape Island boat” (as Nova Scotians call it) and it’s made for catching lobsters, mackerel, cod, haddock, and hake, depending on the season. It’s named Jenny Lynn, after the narrator’s mother’s maiden name, following a local tradition where boats are named after a female member of the owner’s family. The narrator admits that, as a child, he didn’t know all the details about the boat, such as its specific dimensions in feet, or the fact that it had an engine from a Chevrolet truck.
The name Jenny Lynn is significant for several reasons. First, it shows that the narrator’s family conforms to what everyone else in the community does, taking a name that follows a local tradition. In particular, the fact that the boat has the mother’s maiden name even more strongly ties both the boat and the mother to this way of life. The narrator’s mother comes from a long line of people who lived and worked by the sea, and the boat acts as a bridge between this long tradition and the present. The boat is both the source of the family’s livelihood and its link to the family’s traditions. Meanwhile, the narrator’s interposed comment about not knowing details about the boat is a reminder that the story is a frame story, and that the narrator is no longer a part of the tradition that he describes in this scene. Even as it shows the family embedded in its traditions, it also shows that things are going to change.
Themes
The narrator lived in a house that was part of a small community of about 50 houses arranged in a horseshoe shape around the wharf from which the fishing boats set out. The inhabitants of the houses are a mix of Catholics and Protestants, whose ancestors were driven out of their previous homelands by turmoil, such as the religious conflicts in Ireland, the Highland Clearances in Scotland, and the Revolutionary War in the United States.
The fact that the houses are arranged in a horseshoe shape around the wharf emphasizes how central fishing is to the small community’s way of life. The references to the ancestors of the wharf’s inhabitants once again emphasizes the role of tradition in the community. In some ways, however, it also signifies a break with tradition. Groups from various backgrounds—including some that would have been hostile to each other, like Catholics and Protestants in Ireland—have been forced out of their old traditional homes and come together to form a new community that blends elements of their old communities and has developed its own traditions.
Themes
The most important room of the narrator’s house is the kitchen, which has an old-fashioned stove that burned wood and coal. The kitchen has a big wooden extendable table that could be made larger or smaller depending on the situation, with five hand-crafted wooden chairs. Across from the stove is an old couch that dips in the middle. At the south end of the room is a window that looks out on the sea, and opposite that are clothes hooks for the family. Beneath the hooks is where the family leaves their shoes, mostly rubber boots. The wall also has a barometer. The kitchen is used by the whole family and is less organized than the other ten rooms of the house but more organized than the narrator’s father’s room.
The contrast between the cleanliness of the rest of the house and the messiness of the father’s room represents the conflict between the narrator’s mother and father. The mother’s sense of order signifies her devotion to the old traditions—she wants to keep things the same. While the father is also old fashioned in some ways (for example his big rubber boots), his disorder shows that he is not quite as devoted to or content with tradition as the mother. The kitchen window looking out to the sea emphasizes the whole family’s connection to the sea, particularly since the kitchen is the one room the whole family shares.
Themes
The narrator reveals that it was his mother who kept the rest of the house so organized. The narrator describes her as being a tall woman, “dark and powerfully energetic,” like one of the women from a novel by Thomas Hardy. She raised seven children, making all of the meals and most of the clothes, and in addition to that, even maintained elaborate gardens as well as hens and ducks. She is fourteen years younger than the narrator’s father, and the narrator describes her as “of the sea, as were all of her people.”
Alistair MacLeod, the author of this story, was himself a professor of literature and was very familiar with the writing of Thomas Hardy—he wrote his PhD dissertation on him. Hardy was a realist and naturalist writer, who portrayed characters caught up in forces of both tradition and change that were larger than themselves. Just as the characters in “The Boat” reckon with their traditions and ancestors, MacLeod is also reckoning with his own literary predecessors. Once again, the narrator highlights his mother’s connection (as well as her whole family’s connection) to the sea.
Themes
The narrator moves on to describing his father’s bedroom. The door to it is in the kitchen, located between the clothes rack and the barometer. The room always looks like a strong gust of wind had just blown through it. The bed is never made because his father usually sleeps on top of the sheets. Cigarette debris is everywhere, and even the table is full of black cigarette marks, from cigarettes that fell off the ashtray when the narrator’s father didn’t notice. At the foot of the father’s bed is one window that faces out to the sea.
The father’s bedroom is one of the most important settings in the story and full of symbolism. The cigarette debris recalls the narrator’s ashtray at the beginning of the story, and suggests that the narrator’s smoking habits are inherited from his father. The fact that the father’s room only has one window, at the foot of his bed, facing out toward the sea, suggests that his whole life is oriented toward the sea—perhaps whether he likes it or not. The room’s small size and single window could be taken as suggesting a prison cell, an interpretation that will become more meaningful as the story progresses.
Themes
The father has a bureau and a closet in the bedroom. The closet holds a suit, a couple of formal shirts, and black shoes that don’t fit him well. His “friendly clothes,” some of which were knitted by the narrator’s mother, are left sitting on the sole chair in the room. When people visited him, he told them to throw these clothes on the floor so they could use the chair.
The father’s discomfort with formal shirts and suits suggests that he is firmly working class. His carelessness with his clothes (many of which were knitted by the narrator’s mother) foreshadows some of the discord between the father and mother, by showing that he doesn’t always value the same things she does.
Themes
Magazines and books are scattered all over the room. Most of the magazines are familiar popular ones, but there’s a wider variety of books. Some are conventional but many are used paperbacks that used to be sold for ten cents each in special magazine advertisements. Originally, the father purchased these books from the ads himself (which the narrator’s mother disapproved of, because of the cost), but eventually the narrator’s sisters, who had moved away to cities, sent him paperbacks. Pulp writers like Mickey Spillane and Ernest Haycox are mixed in with literary writers like Dostoyevsky and Faulkner, and one noteworthy package contained both the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins and a sexual self-help book called Getting the Most Out of Love.
The father’s large collection of books shows that he is well-read. The fact that the books are ten-cent paperbacks suggests that that father can’t afford to buy expensive hard covers, but that he is dedicated enough to read whatever it is that he can afford. The books in the father’s collection are eclectic—Spillane and Haycox were popular in the early 20th century but mostly forgotten today. Dostoyevsky, Faulkner, and Hopkins, meanwhile, are considered classic writers. The father’s mix of low-brow and high-brow suggests that he’s at once unpretentious and cerebral—a trait that indicates the father is self-taught and directed in his reading rather than educated. The eclectic book collection might also be seen as MacLeod suggesting that the divide between high- and low-brow is not as wide as it might seem if you approach books with an open mind.
Themes
When the narrator’s father wasn’t on the boat, he would lie in bed to read and smoke while the radio played. The narrator often heard his father awake as late as four a.m., and it seemed to him that his father seemed to never fall completely asleep.
The narrator’s father is a creature of habit. The hour of four a.m. appears again, once more creating a link between the narrator and his father. The father seems to never fall fully asleep, suggesting one the one hand that his work is never done and on the other that he so values his free time that he is unwilling to use it to sleep.
Themes
The narrator’s mother hated the mess in his father’s room, and she stopped sleeping in the room shortly after the narrator’s birth. In addition to mess, she also disliked reading, having last read Ivanhoe in high school and finding it extremely boring. But in spite of the mother’s disapproval, the room stayed as it was, with the door open so that everyone in the house could see.
The narrator’s mother’s hatred of reading sets up yet another contrast between her and the father. That the narrator’s mother finds the book boring suggests she sees no value in things that do not pertain to her everyday life, which in turn makes clear her devotion to the everyday traditions of their fishing livelihood. This, in contrast, makes clear that the father has broader interests beyond just being a fisherman. That the mother disapproves of the state of the fathers room but cannot change it makes clear the intractable and enduring nature of the conflict between them.
Themes
The narrator’s sisters are all tall and beautiful like their mother, and red-haired as their father was before his went white.) All his sisters did well in school and helped their mother around the house. The narrator was the youngest sibling and the only son.
The narrator’s sisters have characteristics from both parents, physically showing how things can be passed down from generation to generation. Their work around the house shows how they are being trained by their mother to fulfill roles like hers in the village.
Themes
The narrator’s father worries when the narrator’s sisters play on the wharf with other children, but they do it anyway when their mother sends them on errands. [BF1]Unlike the narrator’s father, his mother doesn’t care about what the girls do with other children, noting that they could be getting up to much worse.
The conflict between the narrator’s mother and the narrator’s father becomes more open as they argue over how to parent their daughters. While the narrator’s mother generally tends to be the stricter parent, the fact that she lets her girls play on the wharf with the other children suggests that she is willing to make an exception because she values the sea and their community so much. The father’s desire to protect the sisters from the wharf suggests he may also have a broader interest in protecting them from exactly the things that the mother values.
Themes
As each sister enters ninth or tenth grade, they begin spending time in the father’s bedroom. Initially, they go into the room when the father’s out, hoping to clean up the mess, but eventually they start reading one of the books. The mother disapproves and tells them to stop reading “that trash” and help with work.
The sisters experience major changes at roughly the age they hit puberty, and these changes are defined by their shifting allegiance between the values of their mother and father. They initially enter their father’s room out of a sense of duty to their mother’s efforts to keep the house clean and orderly, but in short order they become lost in their father’s interest in books. Discovering the father’s books opens their minds to the outside world and as a result makes them less willing to help their mother out around the house. The way that the sister’s all fall into this same pattern suggests larger forces at play in some way, as if the sisters are all caught on the changing tides of time.
Themes
Eventually, the mother begins to mount an organized opposition to what the narrator’s sisters are doing. While not “overly religious,” she begins making religious arguments for why books are a waste of time. In particular, she says these things louder when she knows the narrator’s father is around to hear them. In response, he usually turns up the volume of his radio.
The narrator’s mother believes (correctly) that the father’s books are leading her daughters away from her. Though she’s not “overly religious,” she calls on religion because it is a traditional authority and she respects tradition. The passive aggressive way that the mother tries to make the father hear (and how he turns up his radio in response) show how the two of them can fight without speaking to each other directly. The mother is fighting to keep her daughters focused on the everyday life of being in a fishing family; the father increasing the volume on his radio continues his efforts to bring the outside world into the house.
Themes
Each sister begins to lose interest in her household chores after she starts reading the father’s books. They get summer jobs at a big American-owned seafood restaurant on the wharf that draws in tourists. The mother hates this arrangement because the restaurant owners and patrons aren’t “our people.” She gets angry at the sisters and claims that they aren’t interested in “any of the right things.” The worst argument the narrator overhears occurs when his mother tells his father that she hopes he’ll be “satisfied when they come home knocked up and you’ll have had your way.”
The fact that the restaurant is American-owned and that it draws tourists means that it represents the outside world. It’s presence in the village (and in the story) shows how that outside world has encroached on the insular community of the fishing village. The mother—who cares solely for the village and its traditions to the extent that she doesn’t even like books—does not approve of such encroachment—she interprets it as not only problematic but as immoral, as influencing her children to start caring about the wrong things. When the narrator overhears his parents arguing, it’s shocking because he is used to more passive aggressive disagreements between the two of them; this explicit argument is also the first time that it is made totally clear that the father wants his children to have these experiences that broaden their horizons beyond the village and its traditions
Themes
At the time of the argument, the narrator’s father is 65 years old. He looks gray and tired. The narrator wonders what would happen if his father killed his mother, right there, while he’s watching. But the narrator’s father goes back to his room, and so the narrator comes in, acting as if he hadn’t seen anything. He makes a lot of noise so that they’ll hear him and asks his father “Well, how did things go in the boat today?” His father says not too bad.
The narrator is for the most part a passive observer in his own story—here, he avoids conflict by pretending not to have heard anything. If the father suspects anything, he doesn’t let on—he says things went OK in the boat. The father could be lying, or this could also imply that an argument like the narrator just heard isn’t unusual for the narrator’s father and mother—the only unusual thing was that the narrator was around to hear it. The narrator’s recourse to bringing up the boat also indicates the way that tradition can bind people together—it gives a subject to discuss that is ever present and enduring—but can also offer people a way to hide from the changes that are occurring behind the scenes.
Themes
The narrator’s sisters make decent money as waitresses, so they buy the father a razor and buy the mother the types of clothes that she usually likes, but she puts these clothes away in trunks. One day, the sisters ask the father to take some tourists from their restaurant out on the boat, Jenny Lynn. The tourists like the narrator’s father and, after the boat ride, invite him to their rented cabins that sit up on the hill that overlooks the wharf. While there, his father gets drunk and starts to sing for the tourists. Hearing his father’s voice from the cabins stirs conflicted feelings in the narrator, who begins to tremble and cry. The tourists record the father as he first sings old traditional sea songs, and then switches to the Gaelic war songs of his ancestors. The tourists pay him for all his work, but the narrator’s mother won’t touch the money.
The mother is so stubborn and devoted to her community that she refuses to accept any gifts that can be sourced back to money earned from outside the community. The sisters’ request for the father to take the tourists on the boat suggests that they are much more willing than the mother to blend the new with the old. The father does not seek out the tourists as his daughters do, but neither does he refuse the request to take them on a boat and later sing for them. The father’s knowledge of old songs displays his connection to ancestors he’s never met and shows how the distant past, by being passed down through culture, can still influence the present. The fact that the tourists pay the father and record his songs shows that even those without the same connection to tradition can sense that there is something significant about the wharf—the tourists want to make their own connect to this tradition. Yet the payment also suggests that the tourists see this tradition as a commodity to be bought and sold, not as something that is lived in and passed down through community’s and family’s. That the father is willing to perform the songs for the tourists, and to accept their money in return, further emphasizes his difference in regard to his position on tradition and change from the mother. The narrator’s conflicted feelings place him somewhere between his mother and father—a position he’ll occupy through most of the story.
Themes
Later, in the winter, the tourists send the narrator’s father a picture of him singing with the caption “To Our Ernest Hemingway” with “Our” underlined. The narrator’s father looks out of place at the tourists’ cabin, but he does look a little like a rugged Hemingway in Cuba.
The highlighting under the “Our” is supposed to suggest that the tourists are possessive and condescending—that they view the father more as a pet or a servant than as an equal. Throughout, the story captures the complicated relationship between tourism and local authenticity. The tourists crave the authenticity, but in experiencing it they commodify and change it. Yet in performing for the tourists the father nonetheless passed on, in some way, his cultural heritage to a broader audience, in a way that is similar to Hemingway through his books. The unanswered question is whether the cost of that sharing is worth the benefit. Hemingway also famously wrote about the sea and is another literary ancestor of MacLeod.
Themes
The pattern of each sister starting to read books and work in the restaurant continues as the years go by. They face angry questions from the mother and try to avoid her, but they have long conversations with the father, pushing his clothes off the chair so that they’ll have a space to sit.
The narrator more or less treats all his older sisters as one composite character. Though they break away from the traditions of their Cape Breton wharf, the fact that they all do the same thing suggests that they may not have as much choice as they think, that they are pulled by a different tide than the narrator’s mother—they ride the tide of change, while the mother steadfastly resists it.
Themes
The narrator interjects into his narrative to admit that he’s compressing time and that things didn’t happen as neatly as he describes them. He remembers how his sisters all left for big cities—Boston, Montreal, New York—after marrying men they met while working in the restaurant. The men are rich and handsome, and none of them are fishermen. Despite these men’s financial success, the mother resents them, believing them to be “a combination of the lazy, the effeminate, the dishonest and the unknown.” They are not “her people” and not from her sea.
The narrator’s sisters marry husbands that by many standards are ideal: rich, handsome, and worldly. Still, the mother not only resents these men but actively looks down on them because no amount of money will change the fact that they don’t come from her type of people. She criticizes them as “lazy” and “effeminate,” suggesting that her ideal image of a man is traditionally patriarchal: a strong breadwinner who will provide for his family through manual labor.
Themes
Eventually, the narrator is alone with his mother and father in the house where his sisters had also once lived. When the narrator is fifteen, his father begins to suddenly seem older and sicker. He lies in bed, smoking, reading his books, and listening to the radio. When most of the other residents of the wharf begin preparing for lobster season, he still doesn’t get out of bed.
A new phase of the story begins when the narrator is alone in the house with his parents because he can no longer just sit by and observe. He now becomes a much more active part of the story, which also fits with the fact that he is growing up. That the father lies in his bed all the time alone is probably meant to suggest that he’s not physically ill, but is rather depressed—a signal that not only does he want his children to not fall into the fishing life, but that he himself does not love that life either.
Themes
The narrator’s maternal uncle is also his father’s partner, and while the father stays in bed the uncle helps the mother and the narrator make lobster trapping gear for the boat. The season starts May first, but by March they’re well behind in preparations. The narrator realizes he must put aside his books and school so that he can help his mother and uncle pick up the slack.
The presence of the narrator’s uncle as a business partner reinforces how closely family and economy are tied together in the Cape Breton fishing community. The narrator’s decision to stop his education to help with the lobster season is symbolic—it shows that he is willing to do something different than his sisters and continue living the traditional lifestyle of his parents.
Themes
When the narrator talks to his father for the first time after leaving school, his father tells him that he must go back to school the next day. The narrator protests that he’s already made a decision, but his father holds his ground and says that he won’t be satisfied unless his son goes back. As he says this, the father is lying on the same bed where he conceived the narrator, at age fifty-six. His father then softens his tone, and says that he isn’t telling the narrator what to do, only asking him.
Despite the narrator’s willingness to become more like his father—to choose the sea over school—the narrator’s father advises him to do the opposite. Since the narrator’s father is likely depressed, it’s not hard to imagine why the father would want a different life for his son. The father’s shift from a stern tone to a softer one suggests that he is more sensitive than his rugged exterior would suggest.
Themes
The next morning, the narrator goes back to school. His mother disapproves of this choice. But his father makes a surprising recovery and gets the Jenny Lynn ready to go just in time for lobster season. The narrator is at his high school, “discussing the water imagery of Tennyson” when he sees the lobster trappers going out on the wharf, skillfully doing their work. That night, the narrator’s mother asks his father “Well, how did things go in the boat today?”
The narrator has mixed feelings about going back to school. While he wants to please his father by getting an education, he can’t help feeling that he is merely learning about things by discussing “water imagery” while right down on the wharf he can see men actually doing things in the water. At the end, the repetition of the question “Well, how did things go in the boat today?” suggests a return to normalcy, at least for the moment, which coincides with the father’s dramatic recovery. That recovery, though, also seems to be a part of the father’s private battle with the mother. The father has gotten the narrator to go back to school, when the mother expresses her disapproval, the father cuts the ground out from under her by getting better, such that there is no reason for the narrator to leave school. The implication is that the father is sacrificing once more by rousing himself in order to stop his son from dropping out of school.
Themes
Lobster season ends—the narrator wasn’t able to help because it coincides almost exactly with his school term. Meanwhile, the narrator’s uncle is offered a position on a bigger boat, and everyone knows this means he’s leaving the Jenny Lynn because he’ll make enough money to buy a boat for himself.
The narrator has shown a desire to bridge the gap between his mother and father. But the exact overlap of lobster season with school suggests that this may actually be impossible—he can’t dedicate himself both to the boat and to school. Meanwhile, the departure of the uncle suggests a slow unraveling of the fabric holding their family (and its fishing business) together. The opportunity means the uncle will be able to establish his own business and build his own family, though the mention of the bigger boat may also imply slow changes in the way the community functions.
Themes
The narrator joins his father for the next season—trawling—and this pleases them both. Men stomp by the narrator’s house at 4 a.m., and he and his father join them on the way down to the wharf. When the narrator is not awake on time, they throw pebbles at his window, causing him to panic and rush to get ready. The narrator’s father never wakes the narrator himself. Overall, it is a good summer for the family business.
This scene helps explain the somewhat mysterious first paragraph of the story—when the narrator wakes at the beginning of the story, he is picturing these men of the harbor, headed down to the wharf. The narrator’s father is reluctant to wake up the narrator, perhaps reflecting his deeper reluctance to pull his son into a fishing lifestyle.
Themes
The narrator remembers how his father never tanned because his skin was so ruddy—he just burned again and again. His father wore brass chain bracelets, like many other men in the wharf, in order to protect his skin from chafing. The narrator realizes that summer that maybe his father wasn’t built to be a fisherman, either physically or mentally. He remembers how his father mentioned one night that he had always wanted to go to university.
The father’s brass chain bracelets are an important symbol—they show how he was literally chained to his job. While earlier in the story, the narrator’s father is portrayed as being seemingly destined to be a fisherman (if sometimes an unconventional one), in a key moment the narrator realizes that this wasn’t necessarily the case. That the father wanted to go to university and was never actually cut out to be a fisherman provides a key realization—that the father sacrificed (or was forced to sacrifice) his own dreams to devote his life to doing something he didn’t want, in order to preserve his own family’s fishing tradition. This realization gives a reason to the father’s desire to protect his children from having to sacrifice their own dreams Interestingly, the narrator himself ends up as a professor, suggesting that he was able to accomplish what his father dreamed, and then some—though, given that the narrator himself also seems depressed, it’s clear that achieving this dream came at its own cost.
Themes
The narrator becomes curious about his father’s previous life and wonders why he didn’t marry until after turning forty. He wonders if it was a shotgun wedding, then feels guilty for thinking this when he sees his oldest sister was born eleven months after the wedding. The narrator begins to love his father for spending his life doing something he didn’t like rather than following his dream. The narrator himself feels guilty of being selfish, even over small dreams like his goal to finish high school. The narrator therefore promises his father that he will stay and help with family fishing business for as long as his father lives. The father replies, “I hope you will remember what you’ve said.”
The narrator begins to realize that, even after living with his father for his entire life, he still doesn’t know many things about the man. In fact, he didn’t even think to wonder about many things. At this point, the narrator sees his father’s sacrifice as entirely noble, as something to admire him for. And, so, the narrator makes his own sacrifice and promises to help his father with the fishing business, but he is motivated more by guilt than anything. This suggests that the narrator is in danger of being “chained” to the business just as his father is. The father’s choice of words when he replies to the narrator is significant: while at first it seems that the father is merely saying that he hopes the narrator lives by his word, as the story reaches its conclusion it becomes clear that the father is taking the son extremely literally such that his response is the strongest hint in the story that the father’s death at the end may be a suicide (in order to free his son from the fishing business.
Themes
The narrator’s father’s room overflows with books, which he accumulates and reads even more voraciously than before—some are even hardcovers, sent by the narrator’s far-away sisters, who are becoming parents themselves. The narrator continues to fish with his father into September. The narrator’s mother says that the narrator has “given added years” to his father’s life.
Perhaps aware that his death is on the horizon, the narrator’s father pours renewed energy not only into his work, but also into his passions, like reading. The new hardcover books are a reminder that the sisters have achieved greater financial success than the previous generation—the books represent continuity between generations, but the different formats of the books (paperback vs. hard cover) represent change. This movement toward wealth is, in some communities, the goal change across generations, though the mother does not at all appreciate any change that results in her family abandoning its old ways. The mother’s words about the son adding years to his father’s life turn out to be deeply ironic.
Themes
As it becomes October, then November, the fishing gets harder: the narrator and his father aren’t able to work at night and lose some of a trawl. It gets colder and they must wear heavier clothes. The narrator stands at the tiller of the boat, like his uncle once did. When the water gets choppy, he looks over at his father at the stern to shout over the loud engine. On November 21st, however, on what seemed like the final run of that season, the narrator looks over and sees that his father isn’t there. He knows right then that he’ll never see his father again.
The darker weather and harder working conditions foreshadow the darker direction that the story will soon take. The narrator takes his uncle’s physical place on the boat, suggesting how he could eventually succeed the uncle, fully learn the fishing life, and then take over the boat for his father and continue the family tradition. That this path is just taking shape when the father abruptly disappears from the boat—and the narrator clearly understands that his father is now dead—is a further suggestion that the father committed suicide precisely to make sure that his son did not take this path.
Themes
The narrator remembers more about November 21st: the gray waves around the boat were high and cold, with low visibility because of the snow. If something fell off the boat, it could be carried in the water a mile before the boat could get to it, if you could even figure out the right direction to go. The narrator notes that his father, like his uncle and like many men of the wharf, can’t swim at all.
The low visibility of the weather reflects the ambiguity surrounding the circumstances of the father’s death. Though the narrator never calls his father’s death a suicide, the timing, the circumstances, and the father’s earlier words to his son all make suicide very likely. Because the father’s death cannot be verified as a suicide, however, his wife will still entitled to life insurance payouts (as made clear by the end of the story), which is a likely reason for why the father ensures that his suicide could also be interpreted as an accident. The fact that the narrator’s father and uncle can’t swim is ironic: the very thing that sustains them (the sea) can also kill them. It also further suggests that the father’s time on the sea has always been slowly killing, emotionally and physical.
Themes
In the present day, the narrator notes that the lobster beds off Cape Breton are still just as vibrant as they used to be, and that their lobsters are shipped off to various cities around the world. But despite the high demand for lobster, the old wharf where the narrator used to live has not been touched for the past ten years. Big commercial boats try to come in to fish the waters, but they find “their buoys cut adrift and their gear lost and destroyed.” Police have come to investigate the incidents, but they get no answers from the locals and ultimately just go away.
The story switches back to its external frame now that the interior story has explained how the narrator got from his youth to his adulthood. While much of the story deals with the breaking down of old traditions, this section suggests that some traditions do endure, even if it’s in a diminished form. The commercial boats recall the tourists from earlier, although this time they are not successful and are driven back by the Cape Breton community. Though the narrator associates many bad memories with where he grew up, he still admires the resiliency of the community. At the same time, it’s worth noting that the narrator earlier mentions that his family is descended from people evicted in the Scottish Highland Clearances—which were a historical event in which poorer farmers were evicted by richer interests seeking to combine small tenant farms into larger and more lucrative grazing tracts for livestock. Given such historical resonances, and the way that the story suggests that there are patterns in the changing tides of history, suggests that this momentary success in repelling the outside interests may not be permanent, and that change is likely to come eventually that will significantly change the community.
Themes
The narrator feels uneasy knowing that his mother lives alone and doesn’t get much from his father’s life insurance policy. She’s too proud to ask for additional help, though. The narrator notes that it’s hard to know that she resents him for leaving her and abandoning their traditional lifestyle. She remains devoted to the sea.
The narrator’s mother is so stubborn that even after all her children are gone and her husband is dead, she still clings to the same way of life. As a character, she doesn’t change at all in the story—she actively resists change at all times through the story. The narrator’s feelings toward her seem to be founded in guilt as much as love, and his feelings toward her also seem to capture his feelings toward his loss of his community as well. The implication is that the narrator has left that community and his mother behind, and he can’t go back—and he feels the loss.
Themes
But the narrator comments that it is also hard to know that his father’s body was found on November 28th, ten miles north of the wharf. The body was badly disfigured, with parts of it missing, and the boots are missing too. Around his wrists he still has the brass chains, and his hair is full of seaweed.
The gruesome image of the narrator’s father’s body ends the story on a grim note. The disfigurement of the corpse reflects all the ways that the father suffered physically and mentally for his job as a fisherman and for his traditional lifestyle. The fact that he has chains around his wrists suggests that he is still chained to his work—even in death, as the sea begins to claim what remains of his body. The narrator describes knowing about his father’s death as “hard.” Earlier in the story he viewed his father’s sacrifice to work the boat instead of doing as he wanted as a simple good to be admired. The narrator doesn’t view his father’s sacrifice of his life to free him—the narrator—from the boat as similarly purely noble. The loss of his father is hard, and it's not clear if to the narrator it was worth the cost—though it's also not clear if being sentenced to a life on the boat, as his father was, would have been worth it either. The story ends with a sense of the “rock and a hard place” nature of changing times, and of the tragedy inherent of trying to navigate those powerful historical forces. The story itself, though, functions as a kind of counterweight to the loss the narrator experiences. The story preserves his youth, his community, his mother, and his father in a way that his father’s Gaelic songs preserved that long-lost path—the story is itself a kind of boat keeping afloat a lost past on changing tides.
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