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'The Boat' by Alistair MacLeod (1968) (The relationship between…

- - - - Notably, the mother's alienation from her children due to globalisation reflects Jan Aart Scholte's theory that globalisation has mostly "fragmented communities," and "marginalised subordinated groups."
- - - - This reflects Thomas Friedman's argument that the world has become "flat" through globalisation, enabling individuals and companies (both large and small) to participate in "a large, complex, global supply supply chain extending across oceans, with competition spanning entire continents."
- - - - The son's forced acceptance of the local world occupation as a fisherman similarly to his father reinforces the limitation of the local world in enabling individuality/freedoms. “I... stood in the place and in the manner of my uncle, turning to look at my father and to shout over the roar of the engine and the slop of the sea to where he stood in the stern, drenched and dripping with snow and the salt and the spray and his bushy eyebrows caked in ice.”
        
        Images of the father "drenched," "dripping," and "covered," in ice symbolise his 'smothering' by nature and local-world occupation as fisherman.
      - The father is ultimately "killed" by the ocean, a 'prisoner' of the local world traditions that ultimately 'suffocate' him. "...wedged between two boulders...his shoulders came apart in our hands...the gulls had pecked out his eyes and the white-green stubble of his whiskers had continued to grow in death, like the grass on graves, upon the purple, bloated mass that was his face. There was not much left of my father, physically, as he lay there with the brass chains on his wrists and the seaweed in his hair. His physical 'wedging' between the boulders represents his restricted life due to local world expectations and traditions. The horrifying images of nature literally tearing him apart metaphorically represent his broken existence in the local world. Parenthetically, the father's death by 'nature' is foreshadowed through the tourist's photos of his bleeding lips and "uncultivated" chest hair that later continues growing in his death. The gulls pecking out his eyes and testicles may be interpreted as the tourists who indiscriminately "peck over" and adulterate the local lifestyle through their visit on the boat and recording of his voice performing traditional sea chanties. Interestingly, the final image of the "brass chains on his wrists" may be viewed as representing his position as 'prisoner' of the local world, reinforced by the seaweed that literally covers him.