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No Great Mischief Analysis

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In the book, “No Great Mischief,” the structure helps to shape the book content by putting everything together piece by piece. The author, Alistair MacLeod, puts the story together by telling memories. With these memories, you slowly have the whole picture put together for you like fitting puzzle pieces together. You get these memories and pieces of the story from the narrator, Alexander MacDonald and his older brother Calum. The story plays out like a puzzle because the events are not given to you in order, they are spread out throughout the story for you to pick up on and put them in their proper place. The author withholds the big picture from you and leaves it up to you to put it together with the memories and clues given throughout the story. MacLeod starts the book in the present and he jumps back and forth from the present to the past having Alexander and his brother Calum go down memory lane. With MacLeod setting the book up in this way, it keeps the reader interested in the story that is being told. It …show more content…

Later in the book in a memory it tells us that on Alexander’s first trip with his brothers out on the boat, his older brother Calum is plagued with tooth pain. The pain is so bad that Calum uses his horse Christy to pull it out for him. As stated in the book, “And when Christy heard the whistle, she bunched her shoulders and sprang forward as she used to, without knowing she was tied to a man instead of a boat” (No Great Mischief 80). With this memory, it leads us to believe that Alexander went into Orthodontia after seeing the pain that his brother was in and he could not help him in any way. With Alexander’s ability to be able to go to college and to have that experience with his brother, it was able to give him a successful career because of the different ways they were growing up with Calum not being able to go to a dentist and Alexander being able to go to school to become

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