SOURCE: Hiscock, Andrew. “‘This Inherited Life’: Alistair MacLeod and the Ends of History.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 35, no. 2 (fall 2000): 51-70.

In the following essay, Hiscock examines how MacLeod subverts the tenets of literary postmodernism in his fiction with respect to the significance of personal and communal metanarratives and their relation to self-identity.

I was interested [in “The Boat”] in the idea of choice, of the price we all have to pay for the choices that we make; in the idea that sometimes people choose to do things that they don't want to do at all, somewhat like the father in that story. This is a man who is caught up in a kind of hereditary pattern, where people fish, and the only son inherits the father's boat—that kind of life. But what I was getting at with the father was that here was a person who maybe...