The Boat Alistair Macleod Analysis
Conflict in “The Boat”
In our daily life, we always try to avoid conflict with others in order to make a good relationship to benefit each other. However, in a story, it needs to do opposite thing since conflict is the engine to start and drive the story progress. In “The Boat” by Alistair Macleod, the conflict between the mother and father effectively reflects the clear theme that people’s feeling is complicated exposing the impact of change that resulted from the conflict between tradition and modernization in Eastern Canada.”
1.The conflict between the mother and father reflects people’s different attitudes toward the change of life style. The mother loves traditional life; the father favors new life. The mother tries to keep the tradition …show more content…
The conflict between tradition and modernization also deeply causes people’s interior conflict through father and the narrator’s inner mind contradiction. The narrator remembers that his father had little interest or passion for the work he performed. "And I saw then, that summer, many things that I had seen all my life as if for the first time and I thought that perhaps my father had never been intended for a fisherman either physically or mentally" In the father’s inner mind, he is always struggling between doing the traditional work that he did not like and looking forward to his own life. Maybe the father realized that it was too late for him to make the change because he was too old and had spent his entire life with the boat and the sea, so he left it up to his children to go out and make the changes, to leave behind the family traditions and choose their own paths in life.
The father, a fisherman who clearly would have preferred to get an education, but he does not realize her dream since it is too late when he is clear sense of it.
The narrator also encounters an interior conflict. He loves study and want to go back school. However, his father’s example let him feel he is liable to assist his father fishing. "I thought it was very much braver to spend a life doing what you really do not want rather than selfishly following forever your own dreams and inclinations" With this realization he decides to give up his "silly shallow selfish dream" of completing high school to enter into tradition and
In our daily life, we always try to avoid conflict with others in order to make a good relationship to benefit each other. However, in a story, it needs to do opposite thing since conflict is the engine to start and drive the story progress. In “The Boat” by Alistair Macleod, the conflict between the mother and father effectively reflects the clear theme that people’s feeling is complicated exposing the impact of change that resulted from the conflict between tradition and modernization in Eastern Canada.”
1.The conflict between the mother and father reflects people’s different attitudes toward the change of life style. The mother loves traditional life; the father favors new life. The mother tries to keep the tradition …show more content…
The conflict between tradition and modernization also deeply causes people’s interior conflict through father and the narrator’s inner mind contradiction. The narrator remembers that his father had little interest or passion for the work he performed. "And I saw then, that summer, many things that I had seen all my life as if for the first time and I thought that perhaps my father had never been intended for a fisherman either physically or mentally" In the father’s inner mind, he is always struggling between doing the traditional work that he did not like and looking forward to his own life. Maybe the father realized that it was too late for him to make the change because he was too old and had spent his entire life with the boat and the sea, so he left it up to his children to go out and make the changes, to leave behind the family traditions and choose their own paths in life.
The father, a fisherman who clearly would have preferred to get an education, but he does not realize her dream since it is too late when he is clear sense of it.
The narrator also encounters an interior conflict. He loves study and want to go back school. However, his father’s example let him feel he is liable to assist his father fishing. "I thought it was very much braver to spend a life doing what you really do not want rather than selfishly following forever your own dreams and inclinations" With this realization he decides to give up his "silly shallow selfish dream" of completing high school to enter into tradition and