In the story "The Found Boat" author Alice Munro uses symbolism to portray the struggle five children face as they try to define their roles in a small town with clearly delineated traditional gender roles. There are four main symbols Munro seems to give greater emphasis in portraying the internal as well as external struggle the children go through. The Flood symbolizes the threat of gender roles to overflow the traditional boundaries. The reconstruction of the boat the children find symbolizes the traditional gender roles. The children's journey down the river, in the newly reconstructed boat, symbolizes the children's merging of gender roles. At the end of the story Munro focuses on the river where the children assert the traditional gender roles.
Munro opens the story with the Flood of the Wawanash River, evoking the creation myth of Noah and his ark, and the mythological origin of gender opposition. The Flood threatens to invade the town. Munro uses oxymorons like "hopes of disaster" (Munro 353) and "bright and cold" (353) showing the text's subversive disposition which, the river invading the town, also threatens to overflow the boundaries of its authority. The girls, Carol and Eva, push a log into the water and straddling it, paddle around in the shallows. Their use of a "natural" object and the spontaneous entry into the swollen river contrasts with the actions of the boys who have been busily attempting to construct a raft "from lumber they had salvaged from the water" (354). The girls" interaction with the water places them in the conventional association of the female with nature; their willing contact with the flood contrasts the littoral relation of the boys to the flood. In the water Eva imagines herself on a Viking boat. The fantasy offers her autonomy and adventure-male privileges. But this self image is shaped by constructions of gender difference in the cultural and linguistic order within which she speaks: ""This is a Viking boat," she said.
