The Lost Salt Gift of Blood

by

Alistair MacLeod

Teachers and parents! Our Teacher Edition on The Lost Salt Gift of Blood makes teaching easy.

The Narrator Character Analysis

The narrator is a middle-aged man living in the American Midwest, who fathered John eleven years ago while in Newfoundland as a graduate student, collecting local folklore. He is successful, intelligent, and well-educated, versed in authors like Yeats and Emily Brontë, but seems to have no family or loved ones other than John and John's maternal grandparents, whom the narrator has not visited in many years. At the beginning of the story, he is intensely hesitant about the prospect of seeing John again and feels discomforted and out of place, all the more so as he realizes the extent to which John, unlike him, is a true Newfoundlander. Although he had originally intended to bring John back with him to the Midwest, after he learns from the old man that John’s mother Jennifer has died in Toronto, a newfound awareness of his own ignorance about John’s life leads him to relinquish his son permanently to his grandparents and Newfoundland. The story ends with him returning to the Midwest, back where he began, his rift from his son and remaining family complete.

The Narrator Quotes in The Lost Salt Gift of Blood

The The Lost Salt Gift of Blood quotes below are all either spoken by The Narrator or refer to The Narrator. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Distance and Alienation Theme Icon
).
The Lost Salt Gift of Blood Quotes

Even farther out, somewhere beyond Cape Spear lies Dublin and the Irish coast; far away but still the nearest land, and closer now than is Toronto or Detroit, to say nothing of North America’s more western cities; seeming almost hazily visible now in imagination’s mist.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker)
Related Symbols: Fog
Page Number: 118-119
Explanation and Analysis:

One of them used to have a tame seagull at his house, had it for seven years. His older brother found it on the rocks and brought it home. His grandfather called it Joey. […] It died last week and they held a funeral about a mile away from the shore where there was enough soil to dig a grave. Along the shore itself it is almost solid rock […] It’s the same with people, they say. All week they have been hopefully looking […] for another seagull but have not found one.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), John, John’s Friends
Related Symbols: Gulls
Page Number: 123-124
Explanation and Analysis:

“John here has the makings of a good fisherman,” says the old man. “He’s up at five most every morning when I am putting on the fire. He and the dog are already out along the shore and back before I’ve made tea.”

“When I was in Toronto,” says John, “no one was ever up before seven. I would make my own tea and wait. It was wonderful sad. There were gulls there though, flying over Toronto harbour. We went to see them on two Sundays.”

Related Characters: John (speaker), The Grandfather (Ira) (speaker), The Narrator, Jennifer
Related Symbols: Gulls
Page Number: 128-129
Explanation and Analysis:

All three of them begin to sing, spanning easily the half-century that touches their extremes. The old and the young singing now their songs of loss in different comprehensions. Stranded here, alien of my middle generation, I tap my leather foot self-consciously […] The words sweep up and swirl about my head. Fog does not touch like snow yet it is more heavy and more dense. Oh moisture comes in many forms!

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), John, The Grandfather (Ira), The Grandmother
Related Symbols: Fog
Page Number: 130
Explanation and Analysis:

“When she married in Toronto […] we figured that maybe John should be with her and with her husband. […] Well, what was wrong was that we missed him wonderful awful. […] Like us had no moorings, lost in the fog or the ice-floes in a snow squall. Nigh sick unto our hearts we was.”

Related Characters: The Grandfather (Ira) (speaker), The Narrator, John, The Grandmother, Jennifer
Related Symbols: Fog
Page Number: 134
Explanation and Analysis:

“Jennifer Farrell of Roncesvalles Avenue was instantly killed early this morning and her husband James died later […] The accident occurred about 2 A.M. when the pickup truck in which they were travelling went out of control on Queen St. W. […] It is thought that bad visibility caused by a heavy fog may have contributed to the accident. The Farrells were originally from Newfoundland.”

Related Characters: The Narrator, The Grandfather (Ira), Jennifer
Related Symbols: Fog
Page Number: 136
Explanation and Analysis:

I stand and bend my ear to hear the even sound of my one son’s sleeping. […] I hesitate to touch the latch for fear that I may waken him and disturb his dreams. And if I did, what would I say? Yet I would like to see him in his sleep this once and see the room with the quiet bed once more […]

Related Characters: The Narrator, John, Jennifer
Page Number: 137
Explanation and Analysis:

Once, though, there was a belief held in the outports, that if a girl would see her own true lover she should boil an egg and scoop out half the shell and fill it with salt. […] In the night her future husband or a vision of him would appear […] But she must only do it once.

It is the type of belief that bright young graduate students were collecting eleven years ago for the theses and archives of North America and also, they hoped, for their own fame.

Related Characters: The Narrator, Jennifer
Page Number: 138
Explanation and Analysis:

And perhaps now I should go and say, oh son of my summa cum laude loins, come away from the lonely gulls and the silver trout and I will take you to the land of the Tastee Freeze […] Again I collect dreams. For I do not know enough of the fog on Toronto’s Queen St. West and the grinding crash of the pickup, and of lost and misplaced love.

Related Characters: The Narrator, John, Jennifer
Related Symbols: Fog, Gulls
Page Number: 139
Explanation and Analysis:

He opens his hand to reveal a smooth round stone. […] Suddenly he looks up to my eyes and thrusts the stone toward me. “Here,” he says, “would you like to have it?”

Even as I reach out my hand I turn my head to the others in the room. They are both looking out through the window to the sea.

Related Characters: John (speaker), The Narrator, The Grandfather (Ira), The Grandmother
Page Number: 140
Explanation and Analysis:

The salesman’s wife stands waiting along with two small children who are the first to see him. They race toward him with their arms outstretched. “Daddy, Daddy,” they cry, “what did you bring me? What did you bring me?”

Related Characters: The Narrator, John, The Salesman
Page Number: 142
Explanation and Analysis:
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The Lost Salt Gift of Blood PDF

The Narrator Quotes in The Lost Salt Gift of Blood

The The Lost Salt Gift of Blood quotes below are all either spoken by The Narrator or refer to The Narrator. For each quote, you can also see the other characters and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
Distance and Alienation Theme Icon
).
The Lost Salt Gift of Blood Quotes

Even farther out, somewhere beyond Cape Spear lies Dublin and the Irish coast; far away but still the nearest land, and closer now than is Toronto or Detroit, to say nothing of North America’s more western cities; seeming almost hazily visible now in imagination’s mist.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker)
Related Symbols: Fog
Page Number: 118-119
Explanation and Analysis:

One of them used to have a tame seagull at his house, had it for seven years. His older brother found it on the rocks and brought it home. His grandfather called it Joey. […] It died last week and they held a funeral about a mile away from the shore where there was enough soil to dig a grave. Along the shore itself it is almost solid rock […] It’s the same with people, they say. All week they have been hopefully looking […] for another seagull but have not found one.

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), John, John’s Friends
Related Symbols: Gulls
Page Number: 123-124
Explanation and Analysis:

“John here has the makings of a good fisherman,” says the old man. “He’s up at five most every morning when I am putting on the fire. He and the dog are already out along the shore and back before I’ve made tea.”

“When I was in Toronto,” says John, “no one was ever up before seven. I would make my own tea and wait. It was wonderful sad. There were gulls there though, flying over Toronto harbour. We went to see them on two Sundays.”

Related Characters: John (speaker), The Grandfather (Ira) (speaker), The Narrator, Jennifer
Related Symbols: Gulls
Page Number: 128-129
Explanation and Analysis:

All three of them begin to sing, spanning easily the half-century that touches their extremes. The old and the young singing now their songs of loss in different comprehensions. Stranded here, alien of my middle generation, I tap my leather foot self-consciously […] The words sweep up and swirl about my head. Fog does not touch like snow yet it is more heavy and more dense. Oh moisture comes in many forms!

Related Characters: The Narrator (speaker), John, The Grandfather (Ira), The Grandmother
Related Symbols: Fog
Page Number: 130
Explanation and Analysis:

“When she married in Toronto […] we figured that maybe John should be with her and with her husband. […] Well, what was wrong was that we missed him wonderful awful. […] Like us had no moorings, lost in the fog or the ice-floes in a snow squall. Nigh sick unto our hearts we was.”

Related Characters: The Grandfather (Ira) (speaker), The Narrator, John, The Grandmother, Jennifer
Related Symbols: Fog
Page Number: 134
Explanation and Analysis:

“Jennifer Farrell of Roncesvalles Avenue was instantly killed early this morning and her husband James died later […] The accident occurred about 2 A.M. when the pickup truck in which they were travelling went out of control on Queen St. W. […] It is thought that bad visibility caused by a heavy fog may have contributed to the accident. The Farrells were originally from Newfoundland.”

Related Characters: The Narrator, The Grandfather (Ira), Jennifer
Related Symbols: Fog
Page Number: 136
Explanation and Analysis:

I stand and bend my ear to hear the even sound of my one son’s sleeping. […] I hesitate to touch the latch for fear that I may waken him and disturb his dreams. And if I did, what would I say? Yet I would like to see him in his sleep this once and see the room with the quiet bed once more […]

Related Characters: The Narrator, John, Jennifer
Page Number: 137
Explanation and Analysis:

Once, though, there was a belief held in the outports, that if a girl would see her own true lover she should boil an egg and scoop out half the shell and fill it with salt. […] In the night her future husband or a vision of him would appear […] But she must only do it once.

It is the type of belief that bright young graduate students were collecting eleven years ago for the theses and archives of North America and also, they hoped, for their own fame.

Related Characters: The Narrator, Jennifer
Page Number: 138
Explanation and Analysis:

And perhaps now I should go and say, oh son of my summa cum laude loins, come away from the lonely gulls and the silver trout and I will take you to the land of the Tastee Freeze […] Again I collect dreams. For I do not know enough of the fog on Toronto’s Queen St. West and the grinding crash of the pickup, and of lost and misplaced love.

Related Characters: The Narrator, John, Jennifer
Related Symbols: Fog, Gulls
Page Number: 139
Explanation and Analysis:

He opens his hand to reveal a smooth round stone. […] Suddenly he looks up to my eyes and thrusts the stone toward me. “Here,” he says, “would you like to have it?”

Even as I reach out my hand I turn my head to the others in the room. They are both looking out through the window to the sea.

Related Characters: John (speaker), The Narrator, The Grandfather (Ira), The Grandmother
Page Number: 140
Explanation and Analysis:

The salesman’s wife stands waiting along with two small children who are the first to see him. They race toward him with their arms outstretched. “Daddy, Daddy,” they cry, “what did you bring me? What did you bring me?”

Related Characters: The Narrator, John, The Salesman
Page Number: 142
Explanation and Analysis: