No Sacrifice Too Great

A Literary Analysis.

What does it mean to love? Ernest Hemingway once wrote that the essence of love lies in the willingness to serve, do things for, and ultimately, sacrifice oneself to benefit the object of one’s love. But sacrifice can entail a great many things, from the sacrifice of one’s dreams and inclinations in the name of others to the sacrifice of one’s traditions and way of life in order to embrace the winds of change. In the subconscious mind, tradition forms the guiding framework of life and, though the individual may succumb to the seductions of change or independence, he may return to his traditions as a source of guidance and direction. Yet tradition can also be limiting: it can helplessly restrict individuals to the iron confines forcefully imposed upon them at birth, forever preventing them from shaping their own legacy. Alas, therein lies a great moral quandary, both sides of which are brilliantly represented in Alistair Macleod’s The Boat and Roch Carrier’s A Secret Lost in the Water. In The Boat, Macleod grapples with the former notion; sacrificing one’s personal aspirations for one’s family, whereas in Secret, Carrier deals with the latter idea; specifically, as it pertains to the unwillingness to sacrifice one’s freedom and self-determination to fit between the guideposts of tradition.

In The Boat, Alistair Macleod explores the great value that lies in sacrificing one’s personal aspirations and dreams in the name of supporting and providing for one’s family. It also serves to provide an interesting take on the individual’s relation and response to tradition; while it is important to maintain traditional ways of life, for in that lies the spirit of the family unit, there is also beauty in seeking out a life for oneself that reaches beyond the expectations assigned to them at birth. The central conflict is founded upon the sense of discordance that underpins the relationship between the narrator’s parents. Their differing attitudes towards life and the dissimilitude between their parenting styles has the effect of constructing creating a considerable moral dilemma for the narrator as he struggles to accept one approach over the other. It can be argued, then, that the story’s conflict is largely internal in nature, following the narrator as he grapples with his sense of self, his personal convictions, and his conceptualisations of his family in order to come to terms with the actions, sacrifice, and legacy of the characters around him.

Constructing an accurate characterisation of the narrator’s mother is considerably easier in comparison to the father, for Macleod makes her convictions clear and direct throughout the story. Her traditionalist beliefs centre around her scepticism of outsiders and modernity, her disregard for literature and formal education, and her desire to create a rather archetypal and conventional life for her children. ‘I would like to know how books help anyone to live a life’, she would remark in a harsh, dismissive tone, before questioning the sincerity of the tourists her husband and children often associate with in saying: ‘Who are these people anyway … and what do they … know about the way it is here, and what do they care about me and mine, and why should I care about them?’ The narrator’s father, on the other hand, seems to represent the antithesis of the mother’s traditional beliefs. His love for literature (‘When he was not in the boat, my father spent most of his time lying on the bed in his socks … the pillows propped up the whiteness of his head and the goose- necked lamp illuminated the pages in his hands’) coupled with the lack of fulfilment he draws from his life as a fisherman (‘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’) leaves him with a fraught understanding of tradition and a desire to seek a life beyond the confines of the expectations imposed upon him at birth.

It is interesting to note here that, despite the father’s dreams and inclinations, he never makes any attempt at altering or bettering his own situation. Rather, out of love, he makes the metaphorical sacrifice of his life and submits himself to the dreary, monotonous life of a fisherman such that his children might be able to ascend beyond the confines of tradition, thus providing them with a choice he so lacked in his own time: the choice to make a life for themselves. This aspect of his character; this inclination towards personal sacrifice; is perhaps the single most influential force in driving the story’s central conflict. For example, when the narrator proclaims he will ‘remain with [his father] as long as he lived’, he is essentially taking his first step towards resolving the conflict by choosing to sacrifice his own aspirations to remain with his father in the absence of his sisters. His father, however, not wishing to hold the narrator back from pursuing his own dreams, yet understanding that changing his mind is likely impossible, takes matters into his own hands. It is heavily implied at the end of the story that the father commits suicide to free the narrator of the supposed burden he represents. In effect, he makes not only the metaphorical but also the physical sacrifice of his life to provide the narrator with a chance at making a life for himself, thus resolving the conflict once and for all.

In Roch Carrier’s A Secret Lost in the Water, Carrier speaks of the ways in which the circumstances of life, coupled with an unwillingness to look beyond one’s personal convictions, can inevitably cause individuals to grow up (and oftentimes, grow apart) from their parents and loved ones. It explores the aimlessness and sense of generational disconnect that arises when traditions are lost, causing the fracturing of relationships and the loss of important knowledge. The conflict centres around the narrator’s rather distant relationship with his father, specifically in the context of how the narrator recognises and responds to this relationship at various points in his life. Seen as the story is largely a personal recount, with the narrator reflecting upon his perception of events long past, it is only reasonable to deduce a prevalent character-versus-self conflict wherein the narrator approaches the question of tradition from three different perspectives, provided the luxury of childhood innocence, youthful ambition, and middle-age maturity respectively.

The narrator first reflects upon his relationship with his father through the lens of his childhood. He begins by expressing how, in the time since he began attending school, his relationship with his father began to falter. As he writes, his father ‘was convinced [the narrator] was no longer interested in hearing him tell of his adventures during the long weeks when he was far away from the house.’ Despite this, he recounts a memory of his father demonstrating a certain coveted technique whereby one might be able to locate an underground spring using an alder branch. When the branch begins to move in his hands, indicating the presence of a spring, the narrator is ineffably excited and captivated by his father’s strange skill. In the years that followed, however, as the narrator grew increasingly enamoured by his educational pursuits, he chose to pursue a writing career over his family’s traditional way of life, thus causing him to neglect his relationship with his father. In essence, the narrator sacrifices many important familial traditions and relationships in the interest of focusing on his career; a monumental choice whose ramifications would not be immediately clear to him until much later. As he writes, regarding his youthful ambition: ‘I went to other schools, saw other countries, I had children, I wrote some books, and my poor father is lying in the earth where so many times he had found fresh water.’ When the narrator, now an established writer, returns to his hometown and is asked to replicate his father’s trick, he is unable to do so despite his best efforts. He remarks that ‘somewhere along the roads I’d taken since the village of my childhood, I had forgotten my father’s knowledge.’ The narrator’s unwillingness to sacrifice his own aspirations for a career and his refusal to forgo his freedom and self-determination in any capacity left him blind to the great value that lies within the embrace of tradition, as symbolised by the father’s supposed spring-finding gift. Upon returning to his hometown, however, he comes to realise how important these traditions can be. As a result of his negligence, he now faces the regret of having lost his connection with his father. It is in this realisation that the conflict is effectively resolved as, in the absence of the moral, social, and philosophical framework provided by a strong father-son relationship, he is left directionless and lacking a significant part of his character. Ultimately, Carrier argues that, while striving for greatness and embracing change is important, maintaining traditional family values is equally so. He emphasises the importance of cherishing one’s relationship with their loved ones, being careful not to neglect these relationships amidst all the endless possibilities the world has to offer.

In conducting a comparative analysis of Macleod’s The Boat and Carrier’s A Secret Lost in the Water, the seasoned reader is sure to discover various cardinal distinctions between the two works, specifically in relation to their extensive, philosophical conflicts. While both stories feature introspective, contemplative character-versus-self conflicts that detail a protagonist’s struggle to conceptualise quandaries of personal sacrifice and familial tradition, they differ greatly in the manner they approach these issues and in the overall themes they grapple with. For example, a core aspect of the father’s character in The Boat is his unwavering devotion to his family, his disillusioned outlook on traditional life, and his natural inclination towards personal sacrifice. Consequently, the conflict in this story is largely driven by the father’s actions and the narrator’s response to them. As the conflict progresses, the narrator grows increasingly appreciative of his father’s plight and is able to reconcile himself to his father’s monumental sacrifice – of his ambitions, his desires, and even his life – all in the name of providing the opportunity for his children to ascend beyond the confines of traditional life. Ultimately, the conflict is resolved by consequence of the father’s (rather than the protagonist’s) actions, who takes his own life to ensure that the narrator is able to chase his dreams unburdened by expectations of conforming to a conventional, but unfulfilling standard. In A Secret Lost in the Water, however, it is the protagonist who is called upon to make the sacrifice of his personal inclinations and freedom in order to materialise the value that lies in traditional, deep-rooted family connections; a call he does not heed until it is much too late. The conflict is thus driven by the protagonist’s own thoughts, feelings, and choices, which are motivated by his unwillingness to look beyond his own interests, his inability to balance his career with his paternal connections, and later, by his regret at having lost his family’s important knowledge. Unlike in The Boat, the protagonist in Secret is the sole provocateur of the conflict’s resolution, which occurs by way of the narrator’s realisation and subsequent feelings of regret at having forgotten the spring-finding technique passed down to him by his father. In many ways, the central themes explored in The Boat form the antithesis of those explored in A Secret Lost in the Water. Whereas The Boat provides a somewhat neutral commentary on the value of tradition, emphasising the value in looking beyond traditional expectations while exploring how it can both limit and strengthen an individual depending on how it is applied, Secret takes a firmer stance, arguing that, without tradition, the individual is left aimless and at a loss for meaning. Finally, it is worth noting that the characters in the two works experience the conflict in different dimensions; the protagonist in The Boat grapples with the conflict in the moment; changing and responding in conjunction with the events happening around him, while the protagonist in A Secret Lost in the Water confronts the conflict through a series of personal recollections, responding to it from a distant point in the future.

In The Boat, Alistair Macleod writes with a certain melancholic fervour; ‘There came into my heart a very great love for my father and 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’. His words, though all-too poignant, manage to perfectly encapsulate the courage, the honour, and the deep, ineffable sense of love that lies behind all acts of personal sacrifice. Moreover, it serves as a powerful commentary on how the willingness to sacrifice is not only beneficial but entirely necessary, for it underpins even the most basic conceptualisations of what it means to be human. Though The Boat and A Secret Lost in the Water may differ from one another in a great many ways, these two monumental works of literature both reach the same conclusion; whether it entails the ultimate sacrifice of one’s life for the good of others, or simply the seemingly menial sacrifice of one’s time and energy to give attention to an important relationship, man’s inclination towards sacrifice in any capacity forms the very essence of the human condition.