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Alice munro meneseteung analysis
A real life Alice Munro
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Alice Munro
Writing can often be considered a reflection. Sometimes authors resonate on certain experiences or aspects of their life, and express them through the art of writing. Alice Munro, a renowned short-story author, creatively displays this technique. It is important to first understand that Munro is a writer of fiction, yet her writing has chronologically progressed through situations and experiences in her own life. Being a Canadian native, Munro is often compared to great Southern writers such as Faulkner and OíConnor due to her ability to place her characters in confrontation with tradition. Because of her implicit style of writing, many readers can easily relate to the characters, settings, and plots of her stories. Through the use of complex characters, setting, ironic humor, and symbolism, Munro elegantly creates fictional short stories that easily survive in a non-fiction lifestyle.
Munroís characters are the backbone of her stories. One could assume that Munro first creates her characters, then delicately places the plot around them. In An Ounce of Cure, the main character recalls one of the most embarrassing moments of her adolescence, a crush she thought she would never get over, and how she has grown into a mature young woman in spite of it all. In an interview with renowned writer Graeme Gibson, Munro describes the feelings and expectations she encountered while growing up:
ìAs a child, I always felt separate, but pretty happy to be so. Then in high school,
Suddenly with puberty and everybody getting down to business - girls especially
Getting down to what their role would be - I began to feel terribly out of things and
in a way superficially unhappy ...
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...tinís, 2002. 487-488.
McMullen, Lorriane. ìShameless, Marvellous, Shattering Absurdityí: The Humor of Paradox in Alice Munro.î Probable Fictions: Alice Munroís Narrative Acts. Ed. Louis K. MacKendrick. Toronto: ECW Press, 1984. 354.
Munro, Alice. ìAn Ounce of Cure.î The Bedford Introduction to Literature. 6th ed. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford/St.Martinís, 2002. 451-458.
Munro, Alice. ìPrue.î The Bedford Introduction to Literature. 6th ed. Ed. Micheal Meyer. Boston: Bedford/St.Martinís, 2002. 467-469.
Munro, Alice. Interview with Graeme Gibson. ìAn Interview with Munro on Writing.î The Bedford Introduction to Literature. 6th ed. Ed. Michael Meyer. Boston: Bedford/St. Martinís, 2002. 484-486.
Munro, Alice. Interview. Meanjin. 5 September 1995: 222.
Sheppard, R.Z. ìOn Alice Munro.î Time 30 November 1998: 119.
Updike, John. "A & P" Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. 6th Edition. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2002.
Meyer, Michael, ed. The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing. 5th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 1999.
Meyer, Michael. The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. 8th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's, 2008. 2189.
Adam, Robert M. & Logan, George M. ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Fifth Edition. New York: W.W. Norton Co., 1986.
The Norton Anthology of English Literature.6th ed. v1. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1993.
Myer, Michael. The Compact Bedford Introduction to Literature. 7th ed. : Bedford - St. Martin's, 2006.
Greenblatt, Stephen, and M. H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 9th ed. Vol. A. New York: W.W. Norton, 2012. Print
Updike, John. "A&P." The Bedford Introduction To Literature. Ed. Editor's Name(s). Boston, MA: Bedford/St. Martin, 2005.
Ravitch, Michael. “Alice Munro.” The Yale Review 90.4 (2002): 160-170. Wiley Online Library. Web. 3 March 2013
It has been said of Anton Chekhov, the renown Russian short-story writer, that in all of his “work, there is never exactly a point. Rather we see into someone’s hear – in just a few pages, the curtain concealing these lives has been drawn back, revealing them in all their helplessness and rage and rancor.” Alice Munro, too, falls into this category. Many of her short-stories, such as “Royal Beatings” focus more on character revelation rather than plot.
In Alice Munro’s “Boys and Girls,” there is a time line in a young girl’s life when she leaves childhood and its freedoms behind to become a woman. The story depicts hardships in which the protagonist and her younger brother, Laird, experience in order to find their own rite of passage. The main character, who is nameless, faces difficulties and implications on her way to womanhood because of gender stereotyping. Initially, she tries to prevent her initiation into womanhood by resisting her parent’s efforts to make her more “lady-like”. The story ends with the girl socially positioned and accepted as a girl, which she accepts with some unease.
Stillinger, Jack, Deidre Lynch, Stephen Greenblatt, and M H. Abrams. The Norton Anthology of English Literature: Volume D. New York, N.Y: W.W. Norton & Co, 2006. Print.
Alice Munro's creation of an unnamed and therefore undignified, female protagonist proposes that the narrator is without identity or the prospect of power. Unlike the narrator, the young brother Laird is named – a name that means "lord" – and implies that he, by virtue of his gender alone, is invested with identity and is to become a master. This stereotyping in names alone seems to suggest that gender does play an important role in the initiation of young children into adults. Growing up, the narrator loves to help her father outside with the foxes, rather than to aid her mother with "dreary and peculiarly depressing" work done in the kitchen (425). In this escape from her predestined duties, the narrator looks upon her mother's assigned tasks to be "endless," while she views the work of her father as "ritualistically important" (425). This view illustrates her happy childhood, filled with dreams and fantasy. Her contrast between the work of her father and the chores of her mother, illustrate an arising struggle between what the narrator is expected to do and what she wants to do. Work done by her father is viewed as being real, while that done by her mother was considered boring. Conflicting views of what was fun and what was expected lead the narrator to her initiation into adulthood.
Meyer, M. (2013). Bedford introduction to literature: Reading, thinking, writing. Boston: Bedford Bks St Martin’s.
Munro, Alice. “Prue”. The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. 6th ed. Boston: Bedford, 2002. 467-469. Print.