'Third-Person Narration In Alice Munro's Memorial'

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Alice Munro’s “Memorial” is one of a group of stories in the larger work, Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, which explores the limitations of human emotion and understanding in its attempt to deal with reality and death. Consequently, Munro’s use of third-person narration focalized through Eileen signifies her difficulty of dealing with emotions especially during times of bereavement. As “Memorial” is focalized around Eileen, the reader views the world through her eyes in which June becomes an antipathetic character. The relationship between Eileen and June is strained due to the way of life each sister currently lives as well as their relationship with their parents during their childhood. The Analepsis episodes of their youth signify …show more content…

Eileen has come to do what she can to help June with the details of her son’s funeral but what she finds makes her feel irrelevant and worse, it made her feel deeply disturbed. “She found that she disliked even the tone [June used on the phone], she was discouraged by it” (Munro 183) suggesting that June was dealing with the untimely death of her son in a strange manner without exhibiting any negative emotion that Eileen could find. Therefore, Eileen becomes “a convincing and sympathetic centre of consciousness to human emotion during times of bereavement” (Martin 88), solely from the response to death that is given in Eileen’s viewpoint. However, due to Eileen’s perspective of June’s life, it is difficult to discern if June could have had a sympathetic consciousness as well. As everyone deals with emotions and death in their own way, having only one focalizer makes it very difficult to be sympathetic towards June since Eileen’s perspective taints her. The perspective of the narrative suggests that June is ambiguous and mysterious in her display of emotions due to distortion from wealth as well as her mode of knowledge, psychology. Eileen identifies her as the ideal “missionary wife” (Munro 182) due to the social stratifications associated with her wealthy lifestyle and the way that she fulfils her

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