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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 relationships 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, reminiscing 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 feelings of disappointment, loss, resentment, shame, and love. Munro’s works often reference or allude to the Bible, myths, ancient literature, 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 reinterpret 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. « 43 +
