37 pages • 1-hour read
Vincent Delecroix, Transl. Helen StevensonSmall Boat
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Content Warning: This section of the guide features discussion of death, child death, and racism.
Bureaucracy as a Disguise for Moral Failure
The conflict between the narrator and the policewoman—effectively an internal conflict between the narrator and her own conscience—cannot be resolved because the two figures judge the narrator’s actions according to different rubrics. The policewoman, an avatar of conventional morality, is appalled that the narrator did not show empathy for people who were at risk of drowning, regardless of whether her empathy would have made any practical difference. To lack empathy, in the policewoman’s view, is to lack humanity, and the narrator begins to suspect that her real crime is having exposed the inhumanity of a global system in which borders and passports determine the value of a human life.
The narrator’s defense is that her job offers no room for empathy or humanity: “I'm accused of lacking a soul, but my soul is precisely what I leave in the cloakroom when I get to work, it simply can't fit into my uniform” (32). In other words, her job is simply to follow protocol. There are not enough resources to save everyone who needs saving. Therefore, any injection of moral judgment or empathy into her role would mean choosing whom to rescue based on her personal sympathies. She therefore insists that she does not have the authority to decide who does and does not deserve to live.
The problem with this reasonable argument, as the narrative shows, is that no one can really leave their soul “in the cloakroom.” No protocol can cover every contingency; in the chaos of a real maritime disaster, the narrator is forced to make choices, and these choices reveal, if not her soul, then at least her personal prejudices and moral failings. Delecroix builds a portrait of a system in which procedural competence and moral abandonment can occupy the same sentence. “Calm down help is coming” (15), repeated to a sinking dinghy across roughly three hours, is not simply the script the role provides—it reflects the narrator’s exasperation with the thousands of people who keep choosing to make the dangerous crossing. Her internal monologue gradually reveals the degree to which her personal feelings do color her work. At times, she imagines all migrants as a single person, exasperated as if this one person keeps repeating the same mistake:
Every night, the same voice, the same pleas, because it doesn't matter how many times you pull this idiot out of the water, back he comes—one time, ten times, a hundred times. One night you pull him out when he's drowning and he's safe and sound, he might even thank you, and the next night he's calling back again, because he's in the water again, as though he didn't learn his lesson and he's saying, Please, please. (8-9)
Overwhelmed by the scale of need, she blames the migrants in order to soothe her own conscience. The policewoman points out that the narrator’s anger, together with her refusal to acknowledge the migrants as human individuals, may well have made it easier for her to decide that because they would soon be in English waters, they were not her problem.
When the policewoman asks why the narrator lied about the patrol boat being on another mission, the narrator cannot quite locate her own reasoning: “I was trying to catch the thread of my thought, but couldn’t find it” (44). This decision cannot be explained by protocol, and it thus risks falling instead into the policewoman’s moral framework: She chose, however unconsciously, to let these people die because she was angry with them, or exhausted by the burden of their need. What looked like adherence to procedure turns out to depend on a choice the procedure cannot account for.
The narrator’s insistence on the boundary of her jurisdiction reflects this ambiguity. She tells the policewoman, My judgement has no holes in, no fissures, but it does have boundaries, which correspond exactly to the boundaries of territorial waters […] It's that simple” (27). This is the narrator at her most confident: Within French waters, her judgment is infallible because it simply applies the protocol and the law; outside those waters, her judgment is irrelevant. Once the ship is in English waters, she has no decisions to make because she has no authority. From the policewoman’s perspective, this is merely a convenient excuse—a way to justify what is actually a personal choice. This defense is also ironic in that it reflects the same obsessive belief in arbitrary lines that forces the migrants into the water in the first place. Imaginary lines constrain the movements of the migrants. Because they were born within the imaginary borders of Sudan or Iraq or Syria, they must risk their lives to sneak across other imaginary borders, lines that people who happen to have been born in Europe can cross safely whenever they please. From the policewoman’s perspective, all of the narrator’s decisions are driven by a fundamental category error: She treats real people as imaginary, and imaginary borders as real.
The Complicity of Spectators
One of the novel’s two epigraphs, from the ancient Roman poet and philosopher Lucretius, reads, “Pleasant it is, when on the great sea the winds trouble the waters, to gaze from the shore upon another’s great tribulation” (p. xvii). This epigraph gives voice to the narrator’s critique of a culture that turns the suffering of others into spectacle. Later, the narrator describes nightly disaster as consumed performance: “the migrant drama, migrant tragedy, as though every evening at eight o’ clock we were at the theatre and they were putting on the same play” (7). She rejects the policewoman’s accusation that she lacks empathy on the grounds that empathy is a form of entertainment that benefits only the empathizer. In the narrator’s view, those who feel deep compassion at the sight of migrants struggling to cross the sea are no better than those who, like Eric, feel only nativist rage. Both are consumers who treat other people’s hardship as entertainment. Their feelings serve only themselves.
The watching ship in Part 2 symbolizes the position of the spectator. A cargo ship spots the dinghy, sounds its horn, sweeps a searchlight across the water, and then “incomprehensibly, started up again, and slowly turned away from them, abandoning them to their fate” (73). The scene does not name the ship’s reasoning, though it is later revealed that the narrator, in her misguided effort to follow protocol, told the ship that a rescue vessel was en route and that they should not get involved. From the migrant’s perspective, the vessel watches in silence, does nothing, and leaves. Its searchlight symbolizes the passive gaze of people at home in France and England watching “the migrant drama” on the nightly news. The ship represents the witness who stops, looks, and resumes course.
In Part 3, the narrator turns the camera around. Standing on the beach, she addresses the imagined audience behind her: “all the others at my back, so many of them, thousands, millions of people. The entire world is there” (102-103), and concludes, “There is no shipwreck without spectators” (103). Delecroix’s claim is that the demand for the words of rescue, the public’s appetite to hear “I will save you” said into the microphone, is what the operator’s silence finally exposes: People need to hear her promise to rescue the migrants, even if she can’t or won’t actually do so, so that “humanity need not doubt its humanity” (105). The spectators are not innocent of the script; they wrote it.
The Dehumanization of Migrants
Though the narrator insists that she has no opinions or feelings whatsoever about migrants as a class, the language she uses in speaking of them reveals her inability to see them as real people like herself. This failure of imagination is inherently political. There are children on the boat who are just as young as her daughter, Léa, but she cannot compare those children to her own child because to do so would impose a moral and emotional burden she would not be able to bear. Nothing in the text suggests that the narrator harbors the kind of racist and nativist sentiments voiced by Léa’s father, Eric. Instead, her lack of empathy is a defense mechanism. It prevents her from having to reckon with the knowledge that thousands of people are suffering and dying to gain access to the rights and privileges she enjoys without having done anything to earn them.
Her training, by her own account, requires her to strip the people on the line of every attribute except the fact of drowning. "We save lives, not individuals" (33), she tells the policewoman, and elaborates: She does not want to know who called her, what they fled, who their children are, whether the husband on the phone abused his wife. She believes that she can help people most effectively if she sees them only as blinking lights on a computerized map, and she grows frustrated with the caller’s insistent pleas because they interfere with her ability to imagine him as nothing more than a set of coordinates. The policewoman’s core accusation—one that the narrator cannot fully dismiss, in the end—is that the same dehumanization that makes it easier to make rational decisions on behalf of the migrants also makes it easier to abandon them.
The narrator, weary of responding to similar crises every night, imagines the people who call her at the CROSS station as a single composite voice that keeps stubbornly returning to the same danger: "in reality it's always the same man calling […] The same voice, the same pleas” (8). By the time the actual caller of November 24 dials 14 times, the narrator has prepared a category for him in advance, and the irritation she shows on the recordings expresses exhaustion with the category, not with the man. Part 2 then writes the inverse of this scene: a sustained, embodied account of the dinghy from inside, ending with the young man's last thought, "When I get to England I will work in a grocery store" (76). The novel insists, structurally, on giving back the interiority that the operator's account has taken away.
Delecroix extends the indictment beyond the operator's console. The narrator's ex-partner Eric supplies a more openly cruel version of the same logic, asking why the rescue service does not simply "chuck them straight in the water, with a good thwack of an oar" (11-12), and she notes that his views match "half of Calais, Boulogne and Dunkerque" (11). The cargo ship in Part 2 enacts a physical representation of the same apathy, sweeping its searchlight across the survivors and resuming its course (73). Though their motivations differ, the narrator, Eric, and the people on the cargo ship all participate in the same dehumanization, treating the migrants with a callousness they would never accept for themselves or their own loved ones. The novel's claim is that global inequality—the same inequality that forced the migrants into the boats in the first place—fosters this dehumanization. In order to live with themselves, those in positions of privilege must avoid recognizing that the thousands fleeing war and famine and risking their lives to cross the Channel or the Mediterranean are as real and human as they are.
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