The Boat
... were teaching him of the world beyond their town, and of the changes occurring to the rest of the world. The father realized that it was too late for him to make the change because he was too old and had spent his entire life with the boat and the sea, so he left it up to his children to go out and make the changes, to leave behind the family traditions and choose their own paths in life. The fact that the kitchen’s contents were always visible to all shows that the father has some shame in the fact that his room is different from the rest of the house. Although he has accepted the changes that are going to occur he is still ashamed to be leaving everything that he has grown up with and is why it does not mention anything about the father’s room door being opened or closed. The father also knew the value of books and how important reading is because of all the knowledge that he could learn from the books whereas his wife said that reading was absolutely pointless because there was always work to be done. By about the ninth or tenth grade my sisters… […] …the broken-spined paperback fluttered uselessly to the floor. (Macleod, 469) The father’s room was anti-tradition because whenever one of the daughters would walk in they would end up reading one of the books, which was against what their mother wanted. Once the daughters would get a taste of what the world outside their town was like they would want more and so they got jobs at the Sea Food Restaurant. Working with the people who the mother said were not “our people” gave the daughters a better view of what the world beyond their tradition was like. The mother was angry because she was loosing her family and her traditions to an establishment run by people who were not from Nova Scotia. These foreigners were coming into the town and acting as if they had been there for their entire lives. The father does not have a problem with his daughters working as waitresses because he has alrea...