Duty and Sacrifice Theme Analysis

It is a general axiom of society that duty and sacrifice are heroic and necessary. “The Boat,” in which the parents in a family conflict about what they feel they do or don’t owe to their traditional fishing lifestyle, makes clear that the deeper truth is more complicated. More specifically, the story shows that two people can—for good reason—feel a duty to radically different things. Further, the story captures how seemingly heroic sacrifice can have monstrous consequences—the mother and the father in the story each sacrifice for what they see as the requirements of their family, and those sacrifices end up destroying the family completely. “The Boat,” then, is a story about the complexity of duty and sacrifice, about how people are defined and changed by what they feel they owe and what they are willing to sacrifice, and about the complicated legacies of such sacrifices.

When he’s younger, the narrator is dutiful and willing to sacrifice himself for the good of his family. But it isn’t always clear who or what he should be dutiful towards. The narrator grows up in a house that’s literally divided: between the cleanliness of his mother and the mess of his father. As he watches his sisters grow up, he learns that it often isn’t possible to be dutiful to both parents. The sisters please their mother when they’re younger, only to frustrate her when they’re older. Meanwhile, they initially want to clean up their father’s mess, only to get caught up in the books strewn around his room and, from there, to fulfill his dreams for them to find a way out of the village. Like his sisters, the narrator himself will find himself caught between the expectations of his parents, unable to please them both. He tries to devote himself to the boat, which seems to be the one thing that unites both parents, but this starts a chain of events that ultimately leads to his father’s death at sea.

Sacrifice changes the characters, in ways big and small, and it defines the Cape Breton fishing community where the narrator grew up. To give just one of many examples, the narrator’s father sacrificed his chance at a university education in order to remain a part of the community and support a family. It isn’t clear how much choice the narrator’s father had about his sacrifice—if a university education was even an option for him. Sacrifice was not just an expectation but a necessity for him. This idea of sacrifice as an obligation rather than a choice is reinforced by the ending of the story, where the narrator’s father is discovered dead with the chains that he used to protect his forearms still around his wrists. In a different way, the narrator’s mother also sacrifices her life for her community. Even after the death of her husband and the departure of her children, she remains alone in Cape Breton, living in near-poverty. Her sacrifice allows her to hold on to her identity and her love of the sea, but it also almost completely cuts her off from her own children. The fact that she is so involved in the community—and that she still has more distant relatives that continue taking out boats even as the narrator is in middle age—suggests that this sacrifice is a central feature of life in the community.

While duty and sacrifice are often considered positive qualities, the narrator’s complicated memories show that in reality, the results of these sacrifices are mixed. In many ways, the narrator’s mother and father seem to engage in a kind of war of sacrifice, in which each tries to out-sacrifice the other to achieve what they want. The narrator’s mother sacrifices her relationship with her family in order to try to force her children not to leave their village, and then to feel the sadness of having abandoned it after they did leave. The narrator’s father, meanwhile, goes even further. After the narrator promises that he will help his father with the boat for as long as his father lives, his father—the story strongly implies—commits suicide by allowing himself to be swept off the boat during a storm. The father sacrifices his life in this way to ensure that his wife will still be supported—barely—by his life insurance policy, while also giving his son no reason to stay in the village.  While both the father and mother sacrifice everything for their children, the story does not present these sacrifices as heroic. The mother is left alone, furtively glancing at photos of her grandchildren when no one is looking. And the sorry state of the narrator’s father’s dead body when it is found undercuts the idea that there was anything noble about his sacrifice of his life. His shredded body, and particularly the chains that remain around his wrists, suggest that he was destroyed by his work and could not escape being “chained” to it, even in death.

Ultimately, the narrator’s story is only possible because of his father’s sacrifice—if not for his death, the narrator might still be in Cape Breton working on the same boat as his father, instead of teaching at a Midwestern university. But it is unclear if this is a positive outcome: even as a professor, the narrator sleeps fitfully and, lost in memories of his childhood village, finds himself on the verge of tears. “The Boat,” beautifully captures how sacrifice can be sustaining and life-defining, while simultaneously showing how it can be useless or even self-destructive.