Alistair MacLeod's The Lost Salt Gift of Blood is both regional and rural, but MacLeod's achievement as a realistic Maritime writer is to have made literary form a means of philosophical insight. MacLeod's narrative can be identified as existential because of the repeated concern with several aspects of the human condition: choice, freedom, becoming, alienation, exile, other people, and death. Setting, character, imagery, plot patterns, and retrospection create meanings that would otherwise remain unexpressed by characters. MacLeod's existential fictive world is one of historical and aesthetic faith.
