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GARDENS OF His MAKING: THREE STORIES BY ALICE MUNRO She chooses the painful truth of her husband’s deed and her children’s death instead, and thus she can start to take responsibility for herself by getting off the bus. “Vandals,” “Runaway” and “Dimensions” delve into the intricacies of relationships by exploring our willingness to confront truth, our reactions when facing knowledge that could potentially distance us from a significant other, the sacrifices we make out of loyalty, not so much out of loyalty to others but rather to our stories about who we are in relation to others. At the core of these stories lies the question why we resist knowledge or truth when our relationships, even if they are abusive ones, are at stake. CONCLUSION As demonstrated, the three stories draw upon the archetypal elements of the biblical Fall. The female protagonists, reminiscent of Eve, are tempted to uncover hidden truths that lie within the stories’ silences. They face a pivotal choice: remaining blindly loyal to an enigmatic but flawed patriarchal figure or acknowledging his sins and thus risking the termination of their relationship within a figurative Garden of Eden. These Eves struggle with the decision, as rejecting their Adams represents not only disloyalty but also a challenge to their own self-identity shaped by their relation to the patriarchs. Munro stated on several occasions that she started writing as a child because she felt the ending of Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid” was so unfair. She wanted to write a happy ending to it by all means. In the process of becoming a writer, Munro started to show her characters in their complex relationships. So successful was she in distancing herself from happy endings, that only few of her narratives end happily. However, after she received the Nobel Prize and after she had twice announced that she was retiring from writing for good, she also said that she had surprised herself again by experimenting with happy endings. The conclusion of “Dimensions” can be regarded as one such experiment. The three short stories represent a group of stories about all-consuming love, where the female characters give themselves over to the romantic narrative about passionate love. In these stories, the heroine’s fulfilment in love is possible, paradoxically, at the very moment when she is completely dissolved in it. This is the concept of love in Del’s teenage fantasies in the early volume of Lives of Girls and Women (1971), it appears later in Who Do You Think You Are (1978), and in the stories of Open Secrets (1994) as well. The significance of this group of short stories lies in that it shows both continuity and change in Munro’s vision. Throughout Munro’s work, reality and knowledge are prominent issues. Between her early and later writings, we see a change in the way « 51 ¢
