SOURCE: Nicholson, Colin. “‘The Tuning of Memory’: Alistair MacLeod's Short Stories.” Recherches Anglaises et Nord-Americaines 20 (1987): 85-93.

In the following essay, Nicholson analyzes the intertextual relationship between past and present, self and other, and memory and self-identity in the protagonists of The Lost Salt Gift of Blood.

On February 25th, 1986, in Edinburgh, Paul Ricoeur delivered as the fifth of his Gifford Lectures On Selfhood: The Question of Personal Identity, a paper which he called “Narrative Identity.” The lecture considered the temporal dimensions of the self, and although my own antennae were attuned in particular ways by the work I had been doing on Alistair MacLeod's short narratives, I was nonetheless surprised at the ways in which the lecture seemed to address itself directly and in some detail to the concerns of MacLeod's fiction. “What is it,” Ricoeur asked, “that assures the identity of the self throughout the history that...