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

Clayton’s action asserts his role as the man and puts Eva in her place. She bends down into the water covering her nakedness, symbolically taking a submissive stance. Clayton destroys the merging of the genders, splitting the children into their former opposition of male and female gender roles.

In the story “The Found Boat” Munro uses events of everyday life in a small Canadian town to symbolize the struggle five adolescents go through trying to define their gender roles. Munro states in an interview with Graeme Gibson: “‘I’m not an intellectual writer. I’m very excited by what you would call the surface of life, and it must be that this seems to me very meaningful in a away I can’t analyze or describe… I t seems to me very important to be able to get at the exact tone or texture of how things are..” ( ) In the story Munro, explores the emotional contradictions Eva and Clayton experience as they try to define their gender roles. Placing many of the contradictions in water or near water, like the Flood and the river, Munro uses this a symbol through out the story. In the end Munro places Eva and Clayton in the traditional gender roles accepted by society.

Clayton shook his head violently, as if he wanted to bang something out of it, then bent over and took a mouthful of river water. He stood up with his cheeks full and made a tight hole of his mouth and shot the water at her as if it were coming out of a hose, hitting her exactly, first one breast and then the other.” (359).

When the boys finish rebuilding the bo

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