Summary Of The Boat By Alistair Macleod

Alistair MacLeod’s story “The Boat” took place in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia in the 1960’s. While, Amy Tan’s story “Two Kinds” takes place in Chinatown in San Francisco, California, also in the 1960’s. In both “The Boat” and “Two Kinds” the children have pressure on them from their parents for different reasons but both grow up and come to the realization of what their parents have done for them. In “The Boat” the son is born into a mining/fishing family and throughout the story the mother pushes him towards staying and keeping the family legacy going while the father wants him to get out of that miserable lifestyle that he had to live through. On the other hand, in “Two Kinds” the daughter doesn’t have that figure in her life that offers her

For example, in “The Boat” the child’s point of view explains how he had that pressure on him as soon as he was born “When I was very small, he took me for my first ride on the boat.” (MacLeod, 224) Similarly in “Two kinds” the point of view is from the child and we see how she is forced into playing the piano and becoming a prodigy. From this point of view the emphasis of how much Ni Kan’s mother pushes her becomes part of the theme of the story. Ni Kan is told from the start of her life that she can become a prodigy “‘Of course you can be prodigy, too,’ my mother told me when I was nine.” (Tan, 291) if this story was told from another point of view we would not get the understanding of just how much pressure was on Ni Kan from her mother. Although if we did hear the story from say the mother’s point of view then we would get the understanding of why she put so much pressure on Ni Kan. Both stories are told in a first-person participant from the perspective of the child. Some would argue that the point of view is the most integral part to a story and especially in these two stories, if the point of view were to be changed the story would take on a different meaning and may not be as powerful as they