Blog Question #3 (part B)

[ecoirie]

In MacLeod’s “The Boat”, the father intentionally keeps his room in an untidy manner as way of creating a small refuge against his fishing life and escaping into literature that’s his true unfulfilled path in life. The rest of the fathers life outside his room are filled with things that needed to be done and in an orderly fashion. Because the father’s wife “was from the sea as were all of her people, and her horizons were very literal ones”, she “despised” disorder, books, his room, and the rest of the world that lay outside the fishing community. The more she tried to clean it up, the more of a mess he made, “Still the room remained, like a solid rock of opposition in the sparkling waters of a clear deep harbor”, “with it’s door always wide open and it’s contents visible to all”. Also, tossing his “heavy woolen sweater, mitts, and socks” that were carefully made by his wife into an “unceremonious pile on a single chair”, or floor, showed a blatant disregard her values. His flurry of reading gives way to another world and a dream “that he had always wanted to go to the university.” At one point, the knowledge gained from this room, presents itself in a story telling feast with summer tourists that come to name him “Our Ernest Hemingway”. While the father couldn’t change the direction of his life, he made it clear that his passion for knowledge was a fabric of his soul that couldn't be extinguished and an escape was only a book away spread out along the floor of his room.