"The Boat," by Alistair MacLeod, is a short story that takes place in the Maritimes provinces of Canada. It is about a boy and his family and how tradition affects himself and his entire family's way of life and future. "The Boat" focuses its story around the idea of traditions. How these ideas are perceived and carried out is what fuels this story. Tradition is defined as a custom of beliefs, the handing down of customs and an unwritten doctrine that is just accepted. The main character of the story, which is the narrator, starts the story off by letting us know within the first paragraph that he has broken his family's tradition. "There are times even now, when I awake at four o'clock in the morning with the terrible fear that I have overslept; when I imagine that my father is waiting below the darkened stairs or that the shorebound men are tossing pebbles. I am half out of bed and fumbling for socks when I realize I am foolishly alone" (Lecker 267). He is living a life far different than that of the one he might have lived had he followed in his family's traditions. The narrator then takes us back to his childhood and late teen years. This gives us an insight on how and why tradition was so important and how in the end it broke his family. The mother in the story is the main source of the element of traditions. She is loud, opinionated and very bossy. She has strong beliefs that people who are born on the sea, should stay on the sea. She sees reading as a waste of time and is always annoyed that her husband does so much of it. The mother expects all her children to adopt her traditions and live by the sea just like herself, for the rest of their lives. Ironically all three of her children disregard their mother's beliefs and wishes. They all end up moving away from the Maritime Provinces. The mother is very critical about anything that does not fit in with her beliefs about life. She thought anyone who was not of "her people  were a waste of time. Her family felt the full force of her critical attitude in everything they did. When the boy is asked by his father to go back to school instead of dropping out to help out on the boat his mother disapproves immensely. The boy is only doing what his father asked him to do and his mother has to say that she "never thought that a son of mine would choose useless books over the parents who gave him life" (Lecker 275). Traditions can be good things but they can also be bad. Forcing a way of life on a person is not the way to go a