"The Boat" Write Up

Symbolism

The real boat of “The Boat” isn’t the fishing boat that the narrator talks so much about during the beginning of the story.  “The Boat” is his father’s room. The change that’s occurring in their way of life is as different as his room is to the rest of the house:  “It was a room of disorder and disarray.”  

The narrator’s father was not meant to be a fisherman, though there’s no indication that he’s not good at it.  But his body isn’t meant for it.  His skin chafes and boils appear, he wears the brass bracelets all summer when the other fishermen wear only in the early spring. His father doesn’t want to be a part of the fishing world like the narrator’s mother is, his room is an extension of the world he wants to be a part of.

The narrator grows up at the same time that fishing is changing and their old way of life is coming to an end. Eventually the room is the boat that takes the narrator from the fishing world to his new life as a teacher at a university.  A boat is a vehicle for fishermen but his father’s room becomes a vehicle for the narrator to go to a new life.

Dialogue

The most interesting thing about dialogue in “The Boat” is that there is hardly any. Most of the dialogue is either hidden or implied. The most dramatic dialogue in the story is an argument between the narrator’s parents.

The father reads and listens to the radio alone in his room. He is having a dialogue with the outside world. One by one, the narrator’s sisters and then the narrator himself enter his father’s room and read books and then discuss literature and ideas from the outside world. As the narrator says, “Shortly after, my sisters began to read the books, they grew restless and then lost interest in darning socks and baking bread...” Each of the children use the room as a lifeboat to escape the strict fishing world. They are also escaping the very strict prejudices of their mother.

The closest thing to dialogue in the entire story is the argument between the mother and father. It’s not even fully dialogue because only one person speaks but the other reacts. When the narrator’s mother says, “Well, I hope you’ll be satisfied when they come home knocked up and you’ll have had your way”, the father wheels around and his blue eyes are “flashing like the clearest ice”. Then the father retreats to his room but the narrator calls this “The most savage thing I’d ever heard my mother say”.

The lack of dialogue, or it’s very rare use, is a metaphor for the stifling mood in the lives of the narrator’s father, sisters and himself. In their home, outside of the father's room, they’re almost mute.