The Coming of Age in "The Boat" by Alistair Macleod

The idea of Coming of age in “The Boat” by Alistair Macleod

The short story “The Boat” by Alistair MacLeod embodies the idea of coming of age. It is an elegiac narrative dealing with the consequences of decision making. The story is of a professor at a Midwestern University who chooses to leave his fishing community in order to pursuit knowledge; however he is unhappy and sad about his present life. While the story unfolds the narrator’s past, he is trying to deal with his emotional struggle of rejecting tradition behind and excluding himself from the village he loved. Although he neglected the fishing life, the protagonist was torn between practicing tradition and the outside world. These two concepts of life leave him distressed as he affirms: “I wished that the two things I loved so dearly did not exclude each other in a manner that was so blunt and too clear” (19). After leaving his community, he now mourns over the loss of his father, his estrangement from his mother and the neglect of tradition and natural relationship between the sea and community, he dearly loved. This essay will explore how the narrator, who was once a part of the fishing world and tradition, now attempts to make sense of his life after having have to choose one between the two things he loved equally.
MacLeod frames the story by opening and concluding in the present time, by emphasizing the narrator’s feelings in the present. The protagonist finds himself very lonely after leaving his traditional life behind. He longs for his father and their boat, assert that “No one waits at the base of the stairs and no boat rides restlessly in the waters by the pier” (1). There I a repetition of the word “No” symbolize the absence of awareness in his life is in a disorderly fashion. Macleod uses the words: “Bitter”, “Grey”, and “Darkened” (1-2) to enforce images of darkness and dullness used to depict the gloomy state and a melancholic tone. The protagonist is uneasy with his present life and in other words, wants to re-live his past. His emotional restlessness is greatly evident when he states: “And I know now that that day will go by as have all the days of the past ten years” (2). He is unhappy, lonesome, and dreadfully looking for a glimpse of change. At the end of the story, he is mourning as he’s remembering the death of his father. The protagonist associates the idea of following the tradition and fishing with his mother
The protagonist’s mother having been raised in the fishing village, this traditional life was all she ever knew. The narrator’s father had named the boat after her “The Jenny Lynn” and this was “Another link in the chain of tradition” (4). She was always cooking food for the boat, repairing torn clothes in the boat, and always looking out for the boat. Every day when his father would come home she would ask: “Well, how did things go in the boat today?” (3). She would ask this daily, representing reoccurring routine of the traditions being passed down the generations. She loses her daughters to the outside world, fed up of traditions and go to work in the Sea food restaurant. Her strong conservative beliefs force her to dislike restaurant because “the restaurant was not run by ‘our people,’ […] and that it was run by outsiders for outsiders” (10). According to the mother, the people who were not involved with the fishing community are all considered “outsiders”. She had hard feelings for everything that was not traditional. In addition, she rejected her daughters’ husbands and the narrator states “And in the end she did not really care, for they were not of her people and they were not of her sea” (16). Even though they were family by blood relations and law, she treated and considered them as outsiders because apart from her conventional way of thinking. While the father, uses books and education that symbolizes the journey of life that provides transport intro excitement, intellect, and imagination.
Alternatively, the narrator associates the idea of making his own path with his father’s perspective. It is very clear that the father does not belong with the fishing community. Even though he fishes in the boat, during his spare time he is busy reading books and his room is filled with books which fascinate the children. As much as the mother disliked his ways, the narrator stated: “Still the room remained, like a rock of opposition in the sparkling waters of a clear deep harbour” (8). His mother is always cleaning the house and, that room is the exact opposite and conflicted with the values and traditions that the mother holds. Furthermore, these books demonstrate the father’s interest in the outside world and knowledge. He treasures knowledge, education and making one’s own path to success. He wants his son to choose his own way of life, make his own decision and discover the world’s wonders. He was forced to wear “chafe-preventing bracelets of brass linked chain” all year round, where normal men wore them only in the spring (20). He physically suffers from being a fisherman and is symbolically chained and imprisoned to the sea by these chains on his wrists. He cannot seem to escape the traditional life even if he wants to, and perhaps kills himself to set himself free from a significant sense of duty. In conclusion, the protagonist is mourning over the loss of tradition, the sense of community and the natural relationship between the mother, the sea and the conservative beliefs. He tries to make sense of the decision he took and changed his life forever, leaving his alone and unhappy. Although he follows the path his father wanted him, he is restless and even more miserable than he father was as a fisherman. The narrator is force to live with the guilt of rejecting all his mother’s understanding and aspects in life. This aspect which is a sense of orderly fashioned history and tradition embodied in honest hard work on the sea. The story ends with a very graphic and detailed description of the father’s corpse. This description frames the emotional restlessness at the beginning, for the details of the corpse reinforce several key points in the story and the narrator’s life. The key points which are the father’s feelings with the sea and the narrator’s conflicted feelings about the tradition. These images reflect the devastations of the sea, where literally the body is mutilated by the sea. They also demonstrate metamorphically the effects that the sea, boat and father have had on the narrator’s conflicted identity what can also be defined as a “mutilated identity”. The ending, the father's mutilated body signifies the narrator's own sense of mutilation in respect to his past and his sense of self.