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Readers of Alistair MacLeod have identified "an abiding sense of loss and regret .... [and] a pervasive sense of sadness" (Nicholson 98) in .the writing, as well as the "proximity of most characters to . . .the final elemental darkness threatening to reduce all hopes to one uniform and meaningless conclusion" (Berces 116). MacLeod's short stories are pervasively somber in that they depict a culture that is in a gradual loss or erosion of value. Colin Nicholson considers MacLeod to be "involved in a kind of historical elegizing, playing a pibroch in his own behalf" (99). The "Scottish-Canadian genealogical explorations" (Gittings 93) that largely comprise MacLeod's short stories, as both laments of a lost past and as fictional chronicles of that past, have the function of memorializing the personal-and familial-as well as social history of the narrators and their ancestors. Many of MacLeod's narrators can be considered to be mourning, and the stories that they tell are an activity of that process; that is, telling stories has the function of helping a narrator memorialize the dead and thus partially work through feelings of grief. MacLeod's stories, however, have not received sustained analysis in terms of mourning, or in terms of their elegiac elements, beyond initial thematic identification. In this paper I will explore the narrator's engagement in "The Boat" from the collection The Lost Salt Gift of Blood with this memorializing by delineating the structural elements that allow this story to be identified as a work of mourning, and by exploring the narrator's engagement with processes of mourning-processes that force him to examine his fundamental sense of self.
In a useful conception, Freud defines mourning as work-both in the sense of an action and as an object-a dual connotation that the German word for mourning, Trauerarbeit, supports even more forcefully than the English term does. Thus, mourning is considered as work that needs completing and, in some cases, mourning work can be the result of the action, such as, for example, a literary representation. The textual form that is most readily identified as a "work" of mourning is the elegy. The notion that mourning itself is work implies active involvement by the individual in the processes of grief. While elegy is most commonly associated with...