The Stories of Alistair MacLeod Literary Elements

Short stories/fiction

Various, but Cape Breton, Nova Scotia in Canada is of particular significance in the author’s body of work of short fiction.

MacLeod shows a distinct preference for first-person point of view. “The Tuning of Perfection” and “Island” are notable stories partly stemming from the author’s decision to adopt a third-person perspective.

Unusual among authors of his generation, MacLeod tends to eschew a lightly ironic tone in favor of a sincerely melancholic or wistfully dramatic approach. When the particular circumstances of a scene ore event are appropriate, however, he is not unwilling briefly introduce a moody type of irony into the story to create more depth.

Protagonists: predominantly—almost exclusively—male, working class, and either a father or son in conflict with the other. Antagonist: isolation, alienation and disappointed expectations.

The major conflict that defines and shapes many of MacLeod’s most successful, anthologized, and studied short stories turn on those working class sons rejecting the life that those fathers are expecting. Culture clash as well as generational gaps stimulate this recurring thematic conflict.

The defining characteristic of a MacLeod story is that it ends with anti-climax. Although the stories are generally heavily focused on emotional crises between characters, they are notable for their lack reaching a melodramatic climax at which issues are unrealistically solved or differences reconciled.

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Emily Bronte’s novel Wuthering Heights is alluded to in the “The Lost Salt Gift of Blood” with the lines “Like a foolish Lockwood I approach the window although I hear no voice. There is no Catherine who cries to be let in.”

References to roads, pathways, and journeys populate the entire body of MacLeod’s short fiction. This recurrence becomes imagery serving as a motif symbolizing the journeys through life that serve as the narrative foundation for so many individual stories.

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The most fertile use of parallel construction in the short fiction of the author is put in the service of making comparisons between beasts and humans. Humans behavior is often described using animalistic imagery while people are often endowing animals with human attributes explaining their primitive behavior.

Many of the stories are set in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia which is a mining town fallen upon hard times. The city becomes a metonymic metaphor for many things depending upon the particular context in which it is referenced: “`There it is,’ shouts my father triumphantly. `Look, Alex, there's Cape Breton’” in one instance and for the exact opposite, “For today I leave behind this grimy Cape Breton coalmining town whose prisoner I have been all of my life.”

“I have been somehow apprehensive about even getting off Cape Breton Island, as if at the last moment it might extend gigantic tentacles, or huge monstrous hands like my grandfather's to seize and hold me back.”