In the second paragraph of the story the narrator comments on the preoccupation with death that accompanies these moments, further keying the importance of his father's death to the storytelling. As he states, "I am afraid to be alone with death" which necessitates his rising from bed and departure for an all-night restaurant in search of company. The narrator uses images that are laden with connotations of death to depict his predicament, mirroring his emotional state: "At such times only the gray corpses on the overflowing ashtray beside my bed bear witness to the extinction of the latest spark and silently await the crushing out of the most recent of their fellows". As the day dawns, he focuses on "the countless things one must worry about when he teaches at a great Midwestern university", contextualizing his occupation and geographical location - both far removed from the world of his childhood and adolescence. With daylight comes the certainty that the past is far removed from the present, that it is "only shadows and echoes ... the cuttings from an old movie made in the black and white of long ago," and with daylight comes "all kinds of comforting reality to prove" that the past is long gone. Despite being figments of his imagination, however, the "call and the voices and the shapes and the boat" had the semblance of reality for the narrator during those early morning hours.
The grounds represent a long line of family tradition: "For if there are no signposts on the sea in storm there are certain ones in calm and the lobster bottoms were distributed in calm before any of us can remember and the grounds my father fished were those his father fished before him and there were others before and before and before" . These grounds, by the mother and community, "are held to be sacred", further underscoring the sense that the narrator is rejecting not only tradition, but the notion of a natural symbiotic relationship between sea and humans.
Coming out of the stated above we can say they actually the nuances describing time of the day, environment and weather conditions settle the atmosphere of the story in general. All these factor also have a great influence at the people’s behaviour, at their thinking and perception. Using weather reflecting the characters’ feelings is a quite frequent method to create the general mood of the piece, to carry a reader into the very cener of the evets, to make him feel what the characters feel, to make him understand them better.
In literature writers often use weater and environment not only to create a backgroud for the action, but also to make us understand feelings and emotions of the heroes. It’s some kind of a parallel drawn between internal and external: they reflect each other. It also strengthens the setting of the story.
In the beginning of the story we have a bright example of weather influence the narrator: winter being cold, severe and gloomy, causes the same gloomy feelings come to the narrator - "Boy, it must be really cold out there; you got tears in your eyes".
Actually 3 purposes are followed by usage of such a method:
- to create general atmosphere and mood of the story;
- to express the character feelings brighter;
- to actually emphasize an essence of the events.
In short stories we can often see interrelation between the persons or events and the weather for such a genre of literature requires the story being developed within the limited sizes of the work. So an author needs to express the whole variety of feelings through abstract concepts, displaying them in every possible way.
Bibliography
1. Berces, Francis. Existential Maritimer: Alistair MacLeod's The Lost Salt Gift of Blood. Studies in Canadian Literature 16.1 (1991): 114-28.
2. Clayton, John J. Gestures of Healing: Anxiety and the Modern Novel. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1991.
3. MacLeod, Alistair. The Boat. The Lost Salt Gift of Blood. New Canadian Library. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1976. Rpt. 1992. 105-25.
4. Nicholson, Colin. Signatures of Time: Alistair MacLeod and His Short Stories. Canadian Literature 107 (1985): 90-101.
