Imprisonment in MacLeod's The Boat

Many adults mature and look back to their childhoods with fond, adoring eyes. Some, however, have trouble facing the past. Haunted by the demons from his youth, the narrator of Alistair MacLeod’s short story “The Boat” attempts to relay his message to the world in hopes of mental freedom. The piece opens with images from an insomniac narrator. MacLeod, modeling his writing with Gaelic oral tradition, takes the reader into the narrator’s past with his descriptive first person narrative. He introduces the ideas imprisonment associated with guilt and tradition through images of the mother, father, and the narrator.
“When we returned to the house everyone made a great fuss over my precious excursion….They repeated “the boat” at the end of all their questions and I knew it must be important to everyone” (MacLeod 107). The young narrator faces the predicament of tradition in his society. His mother, a New England Puritan, forces her beliefs upon her children a...