Saturday, September 8, 2012
Blog#3 -- Five Kids In a Boat
In the Story "The Found Boat" by Alice Munro we experience some time in the lives of kids that are clearly poor and in need for some adventure. Their experience grabs the reader and I found myself joining them. When Munro describes their activity in the beginning of the story she states ""Eva and Carol took off their shoes and socks and waded in. The water was so cold it sent pain up their legs." (p6) I could actually feel this feeling having experienced this feeling myself. These kids are clearly poor, they are floating on a log and as they are floating she states "they steered the log around a row of trees, avoiding barbed wire..."(p14) the body of water they float on for recreation is not well kept if there is barbed wire in it. Also the boys take the boat with complete excitement even though its broken. They work hard using tar and finding pieces of wood to repair the boat which also indicates that no lumber is just laying around. When they float to the abandoned building this shows that the times were tough for business. The economy was not good in their town so this business was just a vacant building. "Does it leak? it don't leak." were words spoken about the boat and that also references kids whose parents use a lot of slang and we see this in poor economic times. After jumping in the water when Eva stood up and Clayton shot water out his mount at her breasts she says "lets hide in the bushes, we hate them anyway... dont we Carol..." This indicates that even though Eva did not hide from this incident and rather enjoyed it she is still wanting to keep the facade that she doesn't. The attitude of these was established by Munro and their characters did exactly what was expected of them.
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I feel the same way you do where I can picture everything and actually put myself in this story. It is a well written story. Just the actions of the children helps describe some of the setting and time frame. These days it is very rare that children would put in any kind of work to have fun. I love that the children are excited to have a broken down old boat to work on. They find the positive in everything, even when the girls are just on a log. They are all very imaginative and adventurous. I agree, the setting showed that they are all very poor and are going through hard economic times.
ReplyDeleteI found that Alice Munro style of neutral dictation made the story an easy read. She also did a good job of informing the reader of the kids social standing and of their upbringing in her discription of their surrounding and in the manorisms of at least Eva. I found that the incident and the fact that she wanted to impress Clayton's mom showed Eva's attraction for him, and when she claimed to hate them all, she was just trying to hide the fact that she likes him. It is a good story of teen angst that demonstrates what a young teen would go through in that time frame.
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