Oldal 45 [45]
GARDENS OF His MAKING: THREE STORIES BY ALICE MUNRO
memory and the impact of time on individual lives. Munro’s frequent themes
include coming of age, the negotiation of one’s socially determined background,
leaving home behind, the return to home, the mother-daughter bond, the sick
mother, the feeling of shame, guilt, love, loss, the dynamics of family relation¬
ships in general, and the struggle for self-discovery and self-understanding.
While the texts often encourage readings within the context of autobiography,
they are aimed at understanding the universal human experience at the same
time.
A remarkable feature of Munro’s narratives is that they often feature so-called
Munrovian characters, situations, and places. The female point of view is
typical, and only rarely is there a male focalizer in her works. The reader is
often given a glimpse of how a female protagonist discovers a truth previously
inaccessible to her, how she gains some knowledge that fundamentally changes
her outlook. At times, this realization is condensed into an epiphanic moment
at the end of the narrative, a key element of the open closure in Munro’s short
stories. A recurring character type is the adult woman returning home, rem¬
iniscing and trying to understand her past experiences. The basic experience
for many of her characters is the desire to fit in and the impossibility of doing
so; protagonists often experience a sense of exclusion either because of their
social status or some physical condition’; characters are overwhelmed by feel¬
ings of disappointment, loss, resentment, shame, and love.
Munro’s works often reference or allude to the Bible, myths, ancient liter¬
ature, 19th century English literature, historical events, and popular culture;
her texts are in fact situated in a rich space of intertextuality. The settings of
her stories are typically the main locations of Munro’s own life: Southern
Ontario and British Columbia.
These Munrovian themes, characters, and places proved to be of such a
cohesive force in her fiction that a debate about the possibility of reading her
volumes as novels long dominated critical discourse. In fact, it was only in the
1990s that the full force of her writing was widely recognized as short fiction
and not as an intermediary step towards a possible future novel. In this light,
some features of her fiction should also be reevaluated, for instance, the fact
that characters in one story may very much resemble those in others. Rather
than seeing them as one character reappearing in several stories, they could
be seen as a kind of character that creates an opportunity for readers to rein¬
terpret a theme, situation, character or chain of events; they in fact propel
readers to reflect on similarities and differences with a twist. The subtle,
sometimes imperceptible changes in recurring elements both create a sense
of continuity in Munro’s fictional universe and, at the same time, they may
! Not always their own, e.g., the mother’s illness.
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