Group Activity Two The Boat by Alistair Mac

Group Activity Two The Boat by Alistair Mac. Leod ___________ Michael Goldberg, James Splane, Li Wangle, Ying Zhou 1

Plot Summary of “The Boat” • The narrator faces a tough choice in his life and how he faces the consequences. The narrator is stuck between following his own preferences of education or the fisheries business lifestyle demanded by his mother. The chronology of the plot first includes the young years of the narrator. Then the story proceeds to his teenage years ending in the adulthood, when he became a university professor. The story is not told in a chronological order. It is rather told as a recollection of memories of the narrator from the position of being a university professor. 2

Narration • The narrator is a teenage male and he used to live in a fishing village. It is a first-person narrator and the narrator is reliable because he is consistent and trustworthy. If told from a different perspective, such as from his mother in a third person narrative, the opinion changes and the narration no longer focuses on the son. The words would also change to reflect her focus on staying in the Maritime fishing industry. The narration is completely conventional and we always know what is happening. 3

Character • The main character is a teenage boy who lives in a Maritime fishing village. He faces the conflict between following his mother’s demands and his father’s desire. • The secondary characters: the mother and father, are very crucial to development of the plot because they influence the main characters choices. The mother influences the main character to stay in the fishing business until the father dies. While the father influences the main character to get an education and live another lifestyle which would realize his desired inner dreams. 4

Setting • The list of settings is: the father’s room, the top of the boat, the kitchen. • The setting of the father’s room is the most significant because it symbolizes the narrator’s deepest desires of education and father’s alter-ego. The time is midnight, the place is the father’s room, and the mood is a tired, tense, and rebellious mood. The socio-cultural setting is within a house in a Canadian lower-class fishing village in the late 1950 s. The setting affects the characters’ behaviour and interaction by setting a visible reason, through the displayed literature, for conflict between the mother and the rest of the family. The setting is the most integral to the topic and theme because it shows the narrator’s struggles with his mother’s demands. 5

Topic and Theme • The first major topic from the story is the conflict between old and new ways of life, such as the conflict between the mother and her children. The second major topic from the story is the conflict between desires and reality, the narrator faces a choice between unfulfilled wishes, of getting an education, and the reality that he has to help out his father. The third major topic is choosing between his own and his father’s deep desires of getting an education and his mother’s persistence of staying in the fishing lifestyle. • The most important major topic is the conflict between the narrator and his mother. The theme is consistently referred to throughout the story and the mother always has the same opinion about education without changes unlike the more adaptable father and narrator. Once the father dies, the only thing holding him to follow his mother’s preferences is gone and he is psychologically free to follow his own desires of education. 6

Symbol • The list of symbols in the story are: the books and magazines, the radio, the cigarettes and the ashtray, the boat, the pier. The books and magazines symbolize the father’s and the narrator’s desire for education. The cigarettes and the ashtray represent death and that the father’s dream has died. The boat represents the mother’s desires for the family to be working in the fishing industry. The pier represents the world of possibilities to all, including those in the fishing industry, because “there are no boundaries to the sea” being as a metaphor to everyone having equal possibilities in the world. 7

School/tradition • The tradition is regionalism, specifically to do with the Canadian Maritime fishery culture. The definition of regionalism is a style of literature that is unique and particular to the specific area where the story takes place. The author’s individual work fits into that tradition because he mostly writes about fishermen in Maritime island of Cape Breton. “The Boat” is definitively an example of a writing in the regionalist tradition. 8

Style/tone • The tone that the author uses is a neutral tone, close to the tone of a reporter. There also sub-tones of nostalgia as reflected in the following passage: “And it is not an easy thing to know that your mother looks upon the sea with love and on you with bitterness because the one has been so constant and the other so untrue. ” (Mac. Leod 235). One can also notice some tones of self-reflection, when the author, through the narrator’s voice stated “I say this now with a sense of wonder at my own stupidity in thinking I was somehow free and would go on doing well in school and playing and helping in the boat (…)” (Mac. Leod 231). The prevailing style of sentences in the story are loose sentences. In these sentences, the main point is located at the beginning of the sentence. The story represents an example of Canadian Maritime regionalism related to Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton. 9