Cultural Heritage, Tradition, and Change Theme Analysis

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 melancholy of three hundred years” down to the harbor. The fishing community where the narrator lives is steeped in tradition. By positioning the narrator as both an insider to this tradition and also as someone who breaks away from it, the story explores tradition and the forces of change, and the enduring tension between the two. The story furthers this exploration through the conflict between the narrator’s mother, who is utterly devoted to her cultural traditions, and his father, who has seen his own dreams stifled by these same traditions. “The Boat” captures the tension between tradition and change, the ways that both tradition and change can offer benefits and costs, and how the tension between tradition and change can tear families and communities apart.

The narrator’s father and mother share similar traditions that give them purpose and identity as a fisherman and fisherman’s wife, but they view the costs and benefits of those traditional in very different ways. The narrator’s mother, who is described as “of the sea, as were all her people,” is the family member most resistant to change and devoted to her family’s traditional way of life. She is devoted to her familial role (the same role her mother presumably held before her), dedicated to teaching her daughter’s how to fill that same role, and mistrustful and dismissive of anything that doesn’t fit into that scope, including books, education, or the wealthy outsiders who eventually marry her daughters. She cares so completely about maintaining her family traditions that she basically disowns any of her children who leave the community. While the narrator’s father is a capable fisherman and a master of old traditional songs, he is more open to the outside world. He reads constantly and listens to the radio, and is willing to sing traditional songs to tourists and perform his heritage for them. Most significantly, he encourages his children to read and go to school, even as he knows this will lead them to leave the community. In fact, as the story progresses and the father, it is implied, commits suicide to ensure his son won’t keep working on the boat, it becomes clear that the father acts as he does precisely because he desperately wants his children to escape what he sees as the restrictive traditions of the community—a desire borne out of his own experience of the way that his obligation to his family traditions thwarted his dreams of going to a university. Tradition binds the narrator’s family together, defining each of their roles in ways that are inherited from previous definitions, but his parents’ opposite orientations toward those traditions tear them apart.

The narrator seeks to bridge his parents’ different ideas about tradition, but as he grows up it becomes apparent that this isn’t possible. The narrator’s conflict between choosing tradition or modernity is most prominent when he has to decide between helping with the boat or continuing to go to school. The narrator’s mother pushes him to leave school and join his father on the boat. His father, in response, urges the narrator to go back to school. The fact that the school year and lobster season fall at exactly the same time symbolically shows how the narrator can’t fulfill both wishes of his parents. He has to choose one, and the story presents the choice between choosing tradition and embracing change as mutually exclusive.

In addition to portraying how individual characters view the tensions between tradition and change, the story also explores the interaction between change and tradition more generally. The family’s journey, in which the youngest generation moves away from the family tradition due to personal desires for new experiences and opportunities is the most obvious aspect of this exploration. But the story also shows how the town is changing. Through its portrayal of the tourists who vacation in cottages that overlook the town and love it when the narrator’s father sings old fishing songs, the story shows how the traditions of the residents of the town are attractive to outsiders, such that the outsiders come to experience them, and in doing so change the town. The story also shows how, as the outside world encroaches, so do outside commercial interests. The narrator mentions at one point that local fishermen have twice fought off large fishing companies’ attempts to move into local waters. But the implication is that the big companies can’t be held off forever; an implication given more weight by the fact that the narrator’s family’s ancestors experienced the 18th-century Scotland Highland Clearances, a forced eviction of small farmers by wealthy interests focused on developing large-scale sheep farming. Put another way: the bigger money always comes eventually, and always brings change, often at the expense of those who were there before.

Ultimately, the narrator, his father, and his mother all pay a price for their connection to their heritage and tradition. The mother ends up alone and in poverty, the father ends up dead after sacrificing himself to ensure his son won’t end up chained to the family tradition as he himself was, and the narrator ends up fulfilling his father’s dream of being a university professor but remains haunted by the memories of what he lost. Still, there is also something noble about the characters’ struggle: about the narrator’s ability to achieve what wasn’t possible for his parents, about the mother’s refusal to bend to the forces of familial or societal change, and about the father’s self-sacrifice to work vigorously in a life he never wanted in the name of tradition and then his final sacrifice to save his son from the same fate. In “The Boat,” MacLeod shows the complexities of tradition in an always changing world, how it both sustains and constricts, how it gives meaning but can also dictate one’s lot in life, using the narrator’s family as a focal point to explore changes in an entire regional community.