Analysis Of Alice Munro's The Love Of A Good Woman

In her introduction to Alice Munro’s 1998 volume The Love of a Good Woman, A.S. Byatt notes that “Munro is fluidly inventive in her use of time and tense, as she is in her point of view. She makes long, looping strings of events between birth and death, recomposing events as memory does, but also with shocking artifice” (xv). Indeed, Love’s opening and title story presents the reader with these confusions of time and tense so thoroughly that, since its first publication, Robert Thacker has described it as “a central Munro text,” while Dennis Duffy has lauded it as a “pivotal work in the structure of [Munro’s] fiction” (qtd. in Ross 786). Catherine Sheldrick Ross, meanwhile, asserts that it “challenge[s the reader] to make sense of a text that

As Isla Duncan, borrowing from Gerard Génette, explains, “the holder of the point of view in a narrative is the focalizer…while the character, scene, or event presented in terms of the focalizer’s perspective is the focalized” (10). She continues, explaining that in cases of “objective narration,” which she labels “external focalization,” the focalizer/narrator necessarily remains independent of the focalized (11). Conversely, according to Gerald Prince, in “internal focalization,” “information is conveyed in terms of a character’s conceptual or perceptual point of view” (qtd. in Duncan 11). It is this type of focalization that most concerns us here. While “Love” largely employs external focalization in “I: Jutland,” it presents Enid’s internal focalization throughout its “II: Heart Failure” and “IV: Lies” sections, and that of Mrs. Quinn in “III: Mistake.” As a result of this constant changing of internal perspectives, the story’s “conceptual” and “perceptual point[s] of view” blur to such an extent that the reader must constantly work to ascertain exactly whose language the narrator uses at any given

As Ross argues, Love represents Munro’s return “to earlier material…[but] in a form that is more complex and multilayered” (786). The collection thus “offers her readers eight stories that seize us by the throat.” In so confining itself to “Love,” therefore, the criticism I have cited above has missed the equally multi-faceted enigma that is the volume’s next story, “Jakarta.” Rather than provide three seemingly disparate timelines that eventually centre on a single act, “Jakarta’s” competing narratives significantly examine one major sequence of events — a series of summer get-togethers that a pair of couples share with their friends sometime around 1959. Its four sections move twice between the internal focalization of Kath Mayberry in the years before 1960, and that of her husband Kent as he strives to recall the same summer (though not necessarily the same sequence of events) in the 1990s — at a distance of more than thirty years and a divorce. Thus, while Munro again employs a third-person narrator throughout the story, the reader instead experiences “Jakarta” as two iterations of one unique narrative, focalized through two distinct perspectives that experience the narrative’s key moments either in the present, or by distant recollection. This way, Michael Gorra’s argument that “Munro will not…allow us to see one moment as the background to the other, to say that the story is about one and not the