Fog Symbol Analysis

Throughout “The Lost Salt Gift of Blood,” MacLeod uses fog to symbolize the difficulty of genuine connection and understanding between people and the ways in which the reality of one’s circumstances can be obscured. While describing the setting at the beginning of the story, he observes how “somewhere beyond Cape Spear lies Dublin and the Irish coast; far away but still the nearest land […] seeming almost hazily visible now in imagination’s mist.” In this way, MacLeod identifies mist and fog with imagination, something that hides the reality of the situation. This is fitting because it is not immediately clear why the narrator is in Newfoundland—only as the story goes on does the reader develop an understanding of the connection between the narrator and his son, John. Similarly, when John is singing with his grandmother and grandfather, the narrator reflects that “the words sweep up and swirl about my head. Fog does not touch like snow yet it is more heavy and more dense.” He perceives the distance, the “stranding,” between himself and his son’s family as fog swirling around him. MacLeod represents the narrator’s inability to understand the family’s culture or their love for one another as a literal inability to see them clearly. Fog appears again when the grandfather is describing John’s arrival back in Newfoundland and the day of Jennifer’s death: “It be foggy all the day […] And I says, small to myself, now here in the fog be the bad luck and the death but then there the plane be […] soon he comen through the fog […] That night they be killed.” Fog symbolizes distance and the inability to form connections, and it functions doubly as a symbol here, showing the recovery of the bond between John and the grandfather (John coming “through the fog”) and the distance between Jennifer and both her son and her parents becoming irreparable. Reading about her death in a car crash, the narrator learns that “bad visibility caused by a heavy fog may have contributed to the accident,” connecting the circumstances of Jennifer’s death to a symbol of her emotional and geographical separation from her family. Finally, when the narrator realizes that he is completely unable to bridge the gap between himself and John, he describes his own ignorance and self-deception in terms of fog, saying, “I would like to see my way more clearly. I, who have never understood the mystery of fog,” and, later, “I do not know enough of the fog on Toronto’s Queen St. West […] and of lost and misplaced love.” Knowing nothing about John’s life, heritage, and experience, he can understand him only partly and confusedly, as though through an obscuring fog.