The Road to Rankin’s Point – Perspective of the Story with Quotes 

For students in Year 12 studying the text Island: Collected Stories by Alistair MacLeod, one of the main short stories is ‘The Road to Rankin’s Point’.  Below is a perspective of the story utilising quotes that can be incorporated into your essay as evidence to back up your topic sentences. Page numbers referred to in this summary are from the Vintage Books Edition 2002.

Timeline = 1970’s

Characters = Grandmother 96 & Calum 26

Setting = Cape Breton, isolated farm at the end of Rankin’s Point, in need of repair and the opposite of the wider world, many people have left the area with remains of ruins where houses once stood, she rejects modernity, but the sense of place is significant to the grandmother, it is the place of her ancestors.

Themes = tradition, transition, belonging & death

Grandmother = is strong and independent, rejects the world, rejects change, self sufficient, is happy to keep being the same as she has for decades.  She has glimpsed the world like the nursing home that her family want to move her to, she hates and rejects it, but also fears it in many ways because it is not part of her life, it’s not her home.  She has a limited vision of the world beyond her farm and the road beyond it means nothing to her.  She sees as far as the next island Prince Edward Island but for her that’s the end of the world.  She sees her farm, the town and the island and nothing else.  Her individual strength to survive and not take life easily but work hard at it is clear.  She dies alone but it is the way she wants it to end.  Her death brings the end of an era.

The family wanting her to move = her children ask the same question every year “What are we going to do about grandma?”  This question intrudes on her way of life.  The family think they are doing the best for her but don’t realise they are not.  The reunion photo is really fake trying to show everyone is happy but they are not.  The world has moved on but the grandmother through her old age and unwillingness to leave refuses to change.  The family hope Calum can convince her to move but he is dying of leukemia at 26.  The grandmother hopes he is her saviour from moving that he will help her with the farm.

Descriptions = use the good quotes below to incorporate in your essay:

The road to Rankin’s Point = The road needs repair but it is not part of the wide world.  “At the village’s end [the road] veers sharply to the right … begins to climb along the rocky cliffs that hang high above the sea” p.145-146

Getting to the grandmother’s house = The house is isolated, not connected to the modern world.  “At the wall’s base and at the road’s end nestles my grandmother’s tiny farm; her buildings and her home.  Above this last small cultivated outpost and jutting beyond it out to see is the rocky promontory of Rankin’s Point.  It is an end in every way” p.146  Significant as it is also the grandmother’s end with her death.

Where the grandfather died = “The sharp, right-angled turn and its ascending steepness has always been called by us ‘The Little Turn of Sadness’ because it is here that my grandfather died so many years ago on a February night…” p.148

Grandmother’s house = the porch is “filled with tools and clothes and items from the past” p.155.  In the kitchen the grandmother sits at her table drinking her tea.  She is staring out the window that looks upon the sea“ p.155  Three black and white border collies raise their eyes.  They lie about the floor.  “One is under the table, one against the wood box at the stove and the third beside the grandmother’s chair” p.155  She has homemade biscuits and tells Calum “Get yourself some biscuits from out of the tin” p.157

Grandmother’s violin = “It is a very old violin and came from the Scotland of her ancestors” p.158.  She plays “Never More Shall I Return” a lament of the MacCrimmons her husband’s clan.  This clan was able to play music and had a gift for foreseeing their own deaths.  This is significant because the grandmother dies that night.

Grandmother’s experience of death = She has had a lot of her family die before her, her husband, 3 brothers and 3 sons.  Calum thinks that the grandmother must be lonely “How lonely now and distant these lives and deaths of my grandmother’s early life.  And how different from the lives and deaths of the three sons she has outlived” p.160

Nature descriptions = “Outside the window the blackbirds and cowbirds hop with familiarity around the brindled cows” p.161  “A single white tailed hawk glides silently back and forth” p.161

Grandmother dresses before the party = “… She leans to one side and combs [her hair] away from her body” p.162  “She fastens a brooch of entwined Scottish thistles to the collar of her recently ironed dress” p.162

Wanting Calum to stay with grandmother = “Oh stay with me Calum and I will tell them so when they come.  You can make a good life here for all of us.  I have left you everything in my will” p.164

The advantages the family think of the nursing home = “The advantages of the nursing home are privacy and being with people near her own age and not having to worry about meals” p.166

Getting through the party and the solution = the grandmother dances and thinks “If I can only hang on for another little while, I can win this.  I will not be defeated” p.171  She is resilient  and strong “No one has ever said that life is to be easy.  Only that it is to be lived” p.172  Tension mounts but the grandmother tells her family “I hope none of you are worrying about me.  Calum has said that he is going to stay here with me and now everything will be just fine” p.172  The grandmother smiles as they all leave as “if she has played her great trump card and looks about her in temporary triumph” p.173

Calum tells grandmother “It is no good Grandma.  It is not going to work because I am going to die” p.174  Grandma says “Don’t be silly.  You are only 26.  Your life is just beginning” p.174  When the grandma realises the serious nature of Calum’s illness she is tearful “Oh Calum.  What are we going to do?  What is to become of us?” p.175

The Collie dogs howl where the grandmother lies dead on the road = The night is still but the lonely coastline that leads from Rankin’s Point as “the howls of the three black and white border collies” come across from “The Little Turn of Sadness” p.177.  Grandmother “… lies in the middle of the road at the spot where the little brook washes over the roadbed before the steepness of the final climb” p.178  “The twinning Scottish thistles are still pinned to the colour of her dress.  This is the ending that we have”.  She cannot “see Prince Edward Island now nor ever will again” p.178