Time, Loss, Memory Theme Analysis

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 such a structure—in which the narrator is both looking forward to his coming life and looking back on past events— “The Boat” naturally takes the passing of time as one of its themes. In addition, the narrator’s story describes not just his own transformation over time, but also the slow dissolution of his family’s traditional Nova Scotia fishing lifestyle as modern society slowly seeps into the world of his family and community, and the way that time catches up to his fisherman father. The story, then, becomes a meditation on the passing of time, on what is lost, and what endures.

The story’s frame structure creates a clear definition between past and present, between the narrator as he was then and is now, but at the same time emphasizes the way that memory connects the grown-up narrator to his past self. The story’s first paragraph, where the narrator is half asleep and is momentarily unable to differentiate between his past and his present, establishes the interplay between time and memory in the story. This interplay continues throughout the narrative, as the narrator occasionally interrupts his story to comment about how his memories distort the actual chronology of events. For example, after describing his family’s boat in great detail he says, “I say this now as if I knew it all then… I learned it all very slowly and there was not time enough.” By telling the story in this way, MacLeod emphasizes not just the passage of time, but how the narrator experiences time through memory—the way that the narrator’s past informs who he is, but also the way that who he is now impacts his memories of that past.

The passing of time in the story is frequently connected to loss, whether it’s the loss of innocence, the loss of a lifestyle, or even the loss of life itself. From the opening scene of the story, the “grey corpses” in the narrator’s ashtray indicate that “The Boat” will be a story about death, both literal and metaphorical. Much of the loss in the story has to do with families. The narrator’s sisters leave the house and community one by one as they move off into the wider world, in a pattern so regular that it feels inevitable. Sometimes the loss in the story is more metaphorical. For example, the narrator loses some of his innocence when he overhears a heated argument between his parents and begins to see them both in a different light. As the story progresses, the losses become larger, culminating with the death of the narrator’s father and the implied eventual death of his fishing community’s whole way of life. As the story within the frame passes from the narrator’s childhood to his early adulthood, the passing years are threaded through with an increasing sense of loss, emphasizing how loss is inevitable and only increases over time.

All of the losses that the narrator witnesses in the story, however, become memories. What endures over time are memory, culture, and the natural world—things that stretch beyond the lifespan of any one individual. The story ends with an image of physical destruction—the narrator recalls finding his father’s body and notes, “There was not much left of my father, physically, as he lay there with the brass chains on his wrists and the seaweed in his hair.” This stark image highlights the fragility of the human body, particularly since in the narrator’s earlier memories, his father was strong and vigorous. Notably, the father’s body is destroyed by waves, cliffs, fish, and gulls, and his hair is being replaced with seaweed. This transformation suggests a truth about the natural world: how death and loss fits into a larger natural cycle of renewal. The story presents a single human life as full of inevitable change leading to death, but the natural world absorbs that death and continues on. Meanwhile, the Cape Breton community where the narrator used to live also experiences significant changes over the course of the story, but some aspects of its culture endure. Though big fishing boats owned by outsiders try to come in and exploit the area, they find “their buoys cut adrift and their gear lost and destroyed.” As one visiting official notes: “No one can own the sea.” The harbor residents keep some of their culture even as time passes, because it’s bigger than any one person and because it’s connected to the more enduring natural world.

Ultimately, “The Boat” is clear-eyed that no single human can resist the passage of time. Change and death will eventually come for all. But it does hold out hope for tradition and culture to endure beyond the lifespan of individuals, just as the narrator’s own father carried in him the songs and spirit of his Gaelic ancestors whom he had never met. “The Boat” itself plays into this dynamic, as the story the narrator tells keeps alive the memory of his father, of his torn-apart family, of the village he has seemingly forever left behind. The story is itself a kind of boat, preserving the past into the future.