The narratives of Bowdring's Will Wiseman and Winter's Gabriel English offer the reader a glimpse into a new and different breed of fictional Newfoundlander--not the struggling settler or oppressed
outporter but the urban idler.
LETTERS FROM UNCLE VAL, is an epistolary novel whose elderly
outporter narrator, Valentine Reardigan, lives with his daughter and her family in the suburbs of St.
First is a sixteen year old boy, a displaced
outporter situated in a cramped row house on Boggan Street in St.
Delisle's problem with this is that it is tantamount to Kavanagh's "[s]uccumbing to these stereotypes" and, by making his modern-day outporters the undiluted descendants of Tomas Croft, thereby uncritically placing "his characters and their culture within a larger continuous narrative of cultural development" (32).
So in tune are these outporters with the world that surrounds them that "[j]ust as the breath of the sleeping mother comforts the infant, so the rise and fall of the sea soothes these people"--a people who "suffer no memory of the horrors of history, no sense of past or future, no terror of time" (140).
Outporters have learned to become very versatile people.
Outporters do not see gravel pits as wilderness, but urban dwellers may envision them as thus.
Outerbridge, a prominent Water Street merchant and virulently anti-confederate RGL member, saw rural Newfoundlanders as "ignorant and avaricious
outporters" because of their support for union with Canada.