Island by Alistair MacLeod6/10/2023 ![]() ![]() The narrator, James, is the oldest of eight children, and it turns out that his birth was unplanned. It’s a wonderful technique for showing us the suffocating familiarity of this repetitive, predictable, intimate life lived in a very small house with a very large family. The only way the narrator could know all this detail without seeing it, of course, is because he has seen it so many times before, and it always happens in exactly the same way. He’s imagining “how he must be”, and he goes on to imagine how his father will get up and go downstairs, and we get another highly detailed scene told in the future tense as his father struggles to button his trousers with the three remaining fingers on his right hand while holding his shoes in his left, etc. The description goes on, taking in the bubbles of saliva at the corners of his mouth, the way his left arm and leg are hanging over the bed and touching the floor, as if ready to respond to an emergency.īut the interesting thing is that the narrator hasn’t seen any of this. “lying there on his back with his thinning iron-grey hair tousled upon the pillow and with his hollow cheeks and even his jet-black eyebrows rising and falling slightly with the erratic pattern of his breathing.” There are no stylistic fireworks here, but every word seems carefully chosen, and even the simple language conveys a boatload of meaning.įor example, we start with a beautifully detailed description of the narrator’s father lying in bed: MacLeod’s prose, like the story itself, seems simple but is actually quite complex. ![]()
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