Immigration and Identity
By highlighting several different cultures throughout the collection, Le points the reader to the complexity of identity, particularly the relationship one has to places they used to live. For a group of refugees, the prospect of what life will be like in a new place is among the most important considerations they might have, and by showing complex emotional moments, the storyteller suggests that in such matters, nothing is simple or obvious anymore.
Subjectivity
By including a narrator with the same name as the author, the author Nam Le is admitting that he is speaking from his perspective, and he makes that allowance because the author thoughtfully considered how he could best preserve the stories he tells from other people's lives. For him, admitting his bias stylically is a way of telling the reader to take everything as subjective.
Stories
The Boat is critically acclaimed for its treatment of narrative, especially in the short-story form. By preserving the stories of his parents and his loved ones, and by sharing his own point of view, Le demonstrates how narratives can be inherited and created. The question of what type of stories one should tell is a particularly strong theme in the story "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice." By using the short story as his form, Le parallels the medium in which family stories are often passed down.
Parents, Children, and Family Relationships
Familial relationships, particularly the relationships between parents and children, is perhaps the strongest theme in the collection. Nearly every story features a complicated relationship between parents and children, from Jamie and Elise's parents' failing health, to the parental abandonment of Mayako and Mai, to Nam's difficult relationship struggle with his father's traumatic past. A major feature of these parent-child relationships is the parent trying to do things to support their child but ultimately hurting the child. Le seems to use these stories to work out his relationship with his parents: he knows that they love him, and yet they create pain for him by highlighting his conflicting identities and responsibilities.
Childhood Trauma
The main characters in the stories of The Boat range in age from third grade (Mayako in "Hiroshima") to at least mid-40s (Henry in "Meeting Elise"). The younger characters are depicted as experiencing trauma: Jamie experiences his mother's illness and is beaten up badly; Mayako and Mai are separated from their families and see death all around them; Juan Pablo is forced to kill people to survive. The older characters, in parallel, have flashbacks to childhood trauma of themselves and others: Henry flashes back to the trauma he caused his daughter; Nam flashes back to his tumultuous relationship with his parents while he was using drugs, as well as to his father's extremely traumatic youth; Sarah learns about her friend Parvin's traumatic experiences growing up in Iran. Taken together, these stories show the impact of childhood traumatic experiences both when they happen and for the rest of one's life.
Journey
In some of these stories, such as "The Boat" and "Tehran Calling," the characters are clearly on pilgrimages that are defined by survival and adaptation. That means that the theme of change and relocation (often associated with trauma) is already present in the text. But what about the chapters where characters are set in static locations, without a physical journey to speak of? In those stories, like Jamie's story in "Halflead Bay," the characters journey internally by navigating their identities and place in the world.
Art
Art appears in many forms throughout the stories of The Boat. Jamie's mother creates visual art in "Halflead Bay"; Nam crafts his writing in "Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice"; Elise, in "Meeting Elise," is an accomplished cello player. The art that characters produce parallel their personalities and show their diligence and creativity. Le shows that art can be used to escape one's life as well as to get in touch with one's identity.
