The Boat

by

Alistair MacLeod

The narrator, who isn’t named in the story, is a middle-aged university professor at a Midwestern university. He is frequently haunted by memories of how he grew up, which are very different from his current life, and he temporarily escapes them by going to an all-night restaurant where he meets up with some regulars and a waitress. The narrator recalls living as a child and young man in a close-knit fishing community in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, with his father, mother, and older sisters, as well as his maternal uncle, who works on his family’s fishing boat with his father. As a boy, he watches what the other members of his family do with fascination. He learns about the importance of “the boat,” aka the Jenny Lynn, which his father takes out when he goes fishing and which is named after his mother. His parents’ interest in the boat leads the narrator himself to take an interest in it. Meanwhile, the narrator also watches his sisters, who all seem to be traditional, domestic girls until they hit puberty, when they start reading their father’s books, start working in a seafood restaurant on the wharf that serves tourists, and then ultimately leave the village to marry rich, sophisticated men who live in faraway cities. Once all of his sisters are out of the house and the narrator has grown into a teenager, he begins to play a more active role and must decide between his education, which his father wants him to pursue, and his family’s fishing business, which his mother wants him to prioritize. Though he is eager to uphold his family’s traditions, he ends up choosing to get an education and move away (even becoming a university professor). This choice is partly a result of his father’s urging, but is driven in the end by his father’s death during the final fishing run of the lobster season. Without his father alive, the narrator has less obligation to stay in the community and continue working on the boat. The story implies, though it never makes completely clear, that his father may have committed suicide precisely because he knew it would push the narrator to leave the town and pursue his education. As a highly educated character who used to be very devoted to his parents and his community, the narrator is a bridge between old traditions and the next generation. As such, he lives in the broader world of opportunity that his father wanted for him, and yet he also lives with the ghosts of the traditional family and communal life he has lost.

The narrator Quotes in The Boat

The The Boat 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:
Cultural Heritage, Tradition, and Change Theme Icon
).
The Boat Quotes

There are times even now, when I awake at four o’clock in the morning with the terrible fear that I have overslept; when I imagine that my father is waiting for me in the room below the darkened stairs or that the shorebound men are tossing pebbles against my window while blowing their hands and stomping their feet impatiently on the frozen steadfast earth.

Related Characters: The narrator, The narrator’s father
Related Symbols: The Boat
Page Number: 1
Explanation and Analysis:

When we returned to the house everyone made a great fuss over my precocious excursion and asked, “How did you like the boat?” “Were you afraid in the boat?” “Did you cry in the boat?” They repeated “the boat” at the end of all their questions and I knew it must be very important to everyone.

Related Characters: The narrator, The narrator’s father, The narrator’s mother
Related Symbols: The Boat
Page Number: 3
Explanation and Analysis:

She was thirty-two feet long and nine wide, and was powered by an engine from a Chevrolet truck. She had a marine clutch and a high-speed reverse gear and was painted light green with the name Jenny Lynn stencilled in black letters on her bow and painted on an oblong plate across her stern. Jenny Lynn had been my mother’s maiden name and the boat was called after her as another link in the chain of tradition. Most of the boats that berthed at the wharf bore the names of some female member of their owner’s household.

Related Characters: The narrator, The narrator’s mother
Related Symbols: The Boat
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:

In the winter they sent him a picture which had been taken on the day of the singing. On the back it said, “To Our Ernest Hemingway” and the “Our” was underlined. There was also an accompanying letter telling how much they had enjoyed them­selves, how popular the tape was proving and explaining who Ernest Hemingway was. In a way it almost did look like one of those unshaven, taken-in-Cuba pictures of Hemingway.

Related Characters: The narrator, The narrator’s father, Tourists
Page Number: 14
Explanation and Analysis:

And the spring wore on and the summer came and school ended in the third week of June and the lobster season on July first and I wished that the two things I loved so dearly did not exclude each other in a manner that was so blunt and too clear.

Related Characters: The narrator
Related Symbols: The Boat
Page Number: 19
Explanation and Analysis:

“I hope you will remember what you’ve said.”

Related Characters: The narrator’s father (speaker), The narrator
Page Number: 22
Explanation and Analysis:

On November twenty-first the waves of the grey Atlantic are very high and the waters are very cold and there are no sign­ posts on the surface of the sea. You cannot tell where you have been five minutes before and in the squalls of snow you cannot see. And it takes longer than you would believe to check a boat that has been running before a gale and turn her ever so care­ fully in a wide and stupid circle, with timbers creaking and straining, back into the face of storm. And you know that it is useless and that your voice does not carry the length of the boat and that even if you knew the original spot, the relentless waves would carry such a burden perhaps a mile or so by the time you could return. And you know also, the final irony, that your father, like your uncles and all the men that form your past, cannot swim a stroke.

Related Characters: The narrator, The narrator’s father, The narrator’s uncle
Related Symbols: The Boat
Page Number: 23
Explanation and Analysis:
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The Boat PDF

The narrator Quotes in The Boat

The The Boat 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:
Cultural Heritage, Tradition, and Change Theme Icon
).
The Boat Quotes

There are times even now, when I awake at four o’clock in the morning with the terrible fear that I have overslept; when I imagine that my father is waiting for me in the room below the darkened stairs or that the shorebound men are tossing pebbles against my window while blowing their hands and stomping their feet impatiently on the frozen steadfast earth.

Related Characters: The narrator, The narrator’s father
Related Symbols: The Boat
Page Number: 1
Explanation and Analysis:

When we returned to the house everyone made a great fuss over my precocious excursion and asked, “How did you like the boat?” “Were you afraid in the boat?” “Did you cry in the boat?” They repeated “the boat” at the end of all their questions and I knew it must be very important to everyone.

Related Characters: The narrator, The narrator’s father, The narrator’s mother
Related Symbols: The Boat
Page Number: 3
Explanation and Analysis:

She was thirty-two feet long and nine wide, and was powered by an engine from a Chevrolet truck. She had a marine clutch and a high-speed reverse gear and was painted light green with the name Jenny Lynn stencilled in black letters on her bow and painted on an oblong plate across her stern. Jenny Lynn had been my mother’s maiden name and the boat was called after her as another link in the chain of tradition. Most of the boats that berthed at the wharf bore the names of some female member of their owner’s household.

Related Characters: The narrator, The narrator’s mother
Related Symbols: The Boat
Page Number: 4
Explanation and Analysis:

In the winter they sent him a picture which had been taken on the day of the singing. On the back it said, “To Our Ernest Hemingway” and the “Our” was underlined. There was also an accompanying letter telling how much they had enjoyed them­selves, how popular the tape was proving and explaining who Ernest Hemingway was. In a way it almost did look like one of those unshaven, taken-in-Cuba pictures of Hemingway.

Related Characters: The narrator, The narrator’s father, Tourists
Page Number: 14
Explanation and Analysis:

And the spring wore on and the summer came and school ended in the third week of June and the lobster season on July first and I wished that the two things I loved so dearly did not exclude each other in a manner that was so blunt and too clear.

Related Characters: The narrator
Related Symbols: The Boat
Page Number: 19
Explanation and Analysis:

“I hope you will remember what you’ve said.”

Related Characters: The narrator’s father (speaker), The narrator
Page Number: 22
Explanation and Analysis:

On November twenty-first the waves of the grey Atlantic are very high and the waters are very cold and there are no sign­ posts on the surface of the sea. You cannot tell where you have been five minutes before and in the squalls of snow you cannot see. And it takes longer than you would believe to check a boat that has been running before a gale and turn her ever so care­ fully in a wide and stupid circle, with timbers creaking and straining, back into the face of storm. And you know that it is useless and that your voice does not carry the length of the boat and that even if you knew the original spot, the relentless waves would carry such a burden perhaps a mile or so by the time you could return. And you know also, the final irony, that your father, like your uncles and all the men that form your past, cannot swim a stroke.

Related Characters: The narrator, The narrator’s father, The narrator’s uncle
Related Symbols: The Boat
Page Number: 23
Explanation and Analysis: