24 pages • 48 minutes read
Alice MunroA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Munro’s use of first-person narration creates intimacy between the reader and the narrator, while at the same time limiting the story’s scope. It puts the reader in the position of the narrator and makes the story a mystery that the narrator and reader are trying to solve together, as the reader does not have access to any information or point-of-view other than the narrator’s.
In place of certainties, the narrator can only speculate, and there are several passages in the story where she enters into the consciousness of different characters, trying to imagine what they were feeling and thinking. For example, she imagines Flora reacting to Audrey Atkinson’s disruptive presence in her house: “[…] now the pale face of Flora appears behind the new net curtains. She has dragged herself from her corner, she sees the light-blue sky with its high skidding clouds over the watery fields, the contending crows, the flooded creeks […]” (21). The narrator is a fiction writer, which makes these imaginative leaps plausible. We also understand the emotional impulses behind her fictional embellishing. In expanding on the story that her mother has told her, she sees herself as revealing some of the hypocrisies and pieties of her mother’s generation.
By Alice Munro
Boys And Girls
Boys And Girls
Alice Munro
Dance of the Happy Shades: And Other Stories
Dance of the Happy Shades: And Other Stories
Alice Munro
Dear Life
Dear Life
Alice Munro
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage
Alice Munro
How I Met My Husband
How I Met My Husband
Alice Munro
Lives of Girls and Women
Lives of Girls and Women
Alice Munro
The Bear Came over the Mountain
The Bear Came over the Mountain
Alice Munro
The Beggar Maid
The Beggar Maid
Alice Munro
The Love Of A Good Woman
The Love Of A Good Woman
Alice Munro
The View from Castle Rock
The View from Castle Rock
Alice Munro
Too Much Happiness
Too Much Happiness
Alice Munro
Walker Brothers Cowboy
Walker Brothers Cowboy
Alice Munro