The Boat Alistair Macleod Analysis

Happiness is obviously what everyone wants but to a good father nothing thumps the further of his children; the father in Alistair Macleod’s short story “the boat” is such a father. He puts the happiness of his children over his owe marriage, ignoring the selfish expectations of the mother he teaches his kid to follow their dreams. Sacrificing unrealized aspirations and true personal happiness to fulfil his responsibility has a father and husband. He even makes the ultimate sacrifice in order for his son to follow his dream.
Throughout the story the mother and the father are in conflict, even opposes, the most significant is the way they raises there kids. The mother believe her children her should be brought up the same way she was, following the same tradition he had, living a similar life she did and would not be satisfied otherwise. She sees the fathers love for literature has a huge waste of time and becomes extremely angry at her children for following in their fathers foot stapes. ““Take your nose out of that trash and come do your work,” she would say, and once I saw her slap my youngest sister so hard that the print of her hand was scarletly emblazoned upon her daughter’s cheek while the broken-spined paperback
“I hope you will remember what you’ve said.”(409) the narrator sees the sacrifices his father as made and wishes to lighten his burdens but of course the father does not went his son to follow his foot stapes; so in a finally attempt to give his son what he never had, a chance to follow his dreams, he makes the ultimate sacrifice. In a way the father has freed himself, choosing the last day of the fishing season and making it look like an accident, he has planned the suicide well. He dead knowing that the sacrifices he made give his children the further he has envisioned for