Philosophy Behind the Eight-Ball
MacLeod is one of those writers who is highly dependent upon imagery to push across the themes and meaning of his stories. His fiction is not one defined by rousing action or complicated plotting. It is the simplicity of the story that affords the ability to indulge in the precision of imagery capable of finding philosophical meaning on a pool table:
“And he looked then at the soft, velvet green of the table itself, that held him, he thought, like a lotus land, and finally to the blackness of the eight-ball and the whiteness of the cue, good and evil he thought, paradoxically flowering here on the greenness of this plain.”
Characterization
The bulk of an entire life can be distilled down to its most significant elements for the purpose of exposition through the technique of imagery. It is a tool that readers get to know without really realizing they are being conditioned toward certain expectations. The efficiency of imagery lies in providing just enough precise details to allow the attentive reader to fill in the blanks automatically and without interrupting the flow of the story:
“She was tall and dark and powerfully energetic. In later years she reminded me of the women of Thomas Hardy, particularly Eustacia Vye, in a physical way…She grew miraculous gardens and magnificent flowers and raised broods of hens and ducks. She would walk miles on berry-picking expeditions and hoist her skirts to dig for clams when the tide was low. She was fourteen years younger than my father…and had been a local beauty for a period of ten years. My mother was of the sea, as were all of her people, and her horizons were the very literal ones she scanned with her dark and fearless eyes.”
Setting
Setting is almost always of great importance in a story by MacLeod. Setting is, however, ultimately inextricably linked to the population calling it home and the result is that location never exists in and of itself as if in a vacuum. Imagery demonstrating this is prevalent throughout the author’s short stories, but is perhaps nowhere more insistently exhibited than in this passage near the beginning of “The Road to Rankin’s Point.”
“At the outskirts of the village the narrow paved road turns to the left, away from the sea, and begins its journey inland and outward...It will remain narrow and unpretentious and `slow' in the caution that it demands of its drivers for approximately fifty miles. Then it will join the maple-leafed Trans-Canada Highway and together they will boom across the Canso Causeway and off Cape Breton Island and out into the world. As the water of the tributary joins the major river, its traffic and its travellers will blend and mingle within the rushing stream. They will become the camper trailers with their owner’s names emblazoned on their sides, and the lumbering high-domed motor homes and the overcrowded station wagons with the dogs forever panting through the rear windows.”
Man and Beast
The natural world inevitably intrudes upon the stories of human beings or vice versa in the stories of MacLeod. Nature must co-exist with humanity and the stories take no sides on the issue, but rather more often seek to draw parallels between the animal world and the rest of nature and the humans playing out their dramas all around:
“As the car approaches, the young lambs bound and scramble out of its way, bleating over their shoulders to the patient, watchful ewes. The thick-shouldered rams, with their heavy, swinging scrota almost dragging on the ground, move only at the last minute and then begrudgingly. Their flickering eyes seem to say they would as soon lower their heads and charge as relinquish this stony trail which they obviously consider to be theirs.”
