Generational Differences and Inheritances Theme Analysis

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 tight-knit Cape Breton fishing community and leave to live in big cities around the world. Unlike them, the narrator makes an effort to bridge the gap between generations, attempting to learn the ways of the fishing boat that plays such a massive role in his parents’ lives. While the narrator is successful in some ways at emulating the older generation and winning their approval, his ultimate choice to leave the community suggests that some changes between generations are inevitable. While the story focuses on one family in a specific community, his story explores broader generational differences, showing what is inherited and lost throughout history and how such generational shifts have always been happening.

“The Boat” is a story about generational differences, and it explores the various ways that members of a family might relate to such change. The narrator’s mother fights change tooth and nail. Her meticulously ordered house is her way of preventing change from entering it and affecting her children. The narrator’s father actively (if subtly, at first) encourages his children to be different from him. Although he reads the same books his children do, they are experiencing them at an earlier age and with his tacit support. This early exposure to culture gives them the impetus to leave the community, through marriage or through education. The narrator’s sisters seem to simply melt into the tides of change. By presenting the girls as a group, always referred to simply as the sisters, the story portrays them as having little individual choice—they are portrayed as simply shifting with the times, which take them away from the village where their parents have always lived. The narrator tries to be a bridge. He attempts to quit school and become the kind of fisherman that his father is (and that his mother would approve of). But ultimately, he follows his father’s wishes and chooses to get an education and leave his town behind. Still, even as a university professor in a distant city, he remains connected to his parents through memories that haunt him.

Even “The Boat” portrays the massive shifts across a single generation of a family, the story makes a concerted effort to show that much is nonetheless inherited from parents to children, ancestors to descendants. Some of this inheritance is physical. For example, according to the narrator, his sisters resemble their parents: “They were tall and willowy like my mother and had her fine facial features set off by the reddish copper-coloured hair that had apparently once been my father’s before it turned to white.” Other inheritance involves habits, good and bad. On the positive side, the father passes on to his children a love of books and the worldly curiosity they represent. On the negative side, the father passes on his habit of smoking in bed to his son. That the narrator describes the cigarette butts that remain from this habit as “grey corpses on the overflowing ashtray,” suggests that the father may also have passed along his melancholy and tendency toward self-destruction. Finally, there is the inheritance of culture. Though the narrator’s father never met his ancestors, he sings Gaelic songs beautifully. The narrator does not sing the songs himself, but they live on prominently in his memory, showing how ancient culture survives but takes on new significance for new generations.

“The Boat” makes clear that, even though it focuses on a very specific community at a moment of significant generational changes, such changes have always been happening in history. Though the narrator’s Cape Breton community has existed for a long time, it was initially a community of immigrants, driven from their homelands by different generational changes, such as the conflict and famine in Ireland and the Highland clearances in Scotland. In fact, the tight-knit community at Cape Breton was originally made up of people from very different backgrounds. The story notes that some are Catholic and others are Protestant—two groups that have historically been at odds with each other. The unity of the community during the narrator’s parents’ generation was itself a departure from previous generations, when the inhabitants would have been recent immigrants with their own separate traditions.

The story, then, explores the interplay between what changes and what is preserved across generations, and portrays how these two processes are always happening at the same time. Further, “The Boat” itself can be seen as embodying this same dynamic. The story is most immediately notable for its narrative of a family torn apart by change. At the same time, in telling the story the narrator preserves the lost past, ensuring that it won’t be lost. The story itself functions as a document of both change and inheritance.