The Boat Themes

When the narrator wakes up at the beginning of Alistair MacLeod’s “The Boat,” he is confused and feels as if he is transported to an earlier time, back when he was young and living in a fishing village on Cape Breton. Sometimes characters fin the story eel the pull of an even more distant past: when the narrator’s father sings for tourists, he channels “scattered Highland ancestors he had never seen,” bringing the “savage…

As a college professor at a Midwestern university in the United States, the narrator of “The Boat” has a very different life than his parents did at his age. While the narrator’s mother and father have dissimilar personalities, they share many life experiences because of when and where they were born. They have lived by the sea their whole lives—something none of their children will ever do. The narrator’s sisters marry men from outside the…

In “The Boat,” a middle-aged college professor tells the story of his childhood and teenage years as the youngest child in a Nova Scotian fishing family. “The Boat” is a frame story, in which the narrator tells the story from two points of view—as the boy and teenager experiencing the events of the story for the first time, and as the older man looking back and commenting on those events and on their repercussions. With…