Things within things : possible readings of Alice Munro’s “The Love of a Good Woman”

Alice Munro’s "The Love of a Good Woman" is perhaps one of the most important stories in her œuvre in terms of how it accentuates the motivation for the Nobel Prize of Literature: "master of the contemporary short story." The story was first published in The New Yorker in December 1996, and over 70 pages long it pushes every rule of what it means to be categorised as short fiction. Early critic of the genre, Edgar Allan Poe distinguished short fiction as an extremely focused attention to plot, properly defined as that to which "no part can be displaced wit- hout ruin to the whole". Part of Munro’s art is that of stitching seemingly disparate narrative threads together and still leaving the reader with a sense of complete- ness. The story’s publication in The New Yorker included a subtitle that is not part of its appearing in the two-year-later collection. The subtitle, "a murder, a mystery, a romance," is interesting in how it is suggestive for possible interpretations and the story’s play with genres. In a discussion of critical readings of Munro’s story, I propose that the story’s resonation of significance lies in its daring composition of narrative threads where depths of meaning keep occurring depending on what aspects one is focusing on for the moment. Further, I suggest that a sense of completion is created in tone and paralleling of imagery. Meaning emerges in what I have called a story’s "possibility-space." This term has affinities with what others have named "sideshadowing," where rather than resisting closure, the sto- ry turns back into itself, and compels the reader to further reflect on the difficult issues of human behaviour raised in the story

Possibility-Space and Its Imaginative Variations in Alice Munro's Short Stories

With its perennial interest in the seemingly ordinary lives of small-town people, Alice Munro’s fiction displays a deceptively simple surface reality that on closer scrutiny reveals intricate levels of unexpected complexity about the fundamentals of human experience: love, choice, mortality, faith and the force of language. This study takes as its main purpose the exploration of Munro’s stories in terms of the intricacy of emotions in the face of commonplace events of life and their emerging possibilities. I argue that the ontological levels of fiction and reality remain in the realm of the real; these levels exist and merge as the possibilities of each other. Munro’s realism is explored in terms of its connection to possibilities that arise out of a particular type of fatality. The phenomenon of possibility permeates Munro’s stories. An investigation of this phenomenon shows a curious paradox between possibility and necessity. In order to discuss the complexity of this paradox I introduce the temporal/spatial concept of possibility-space and notions of the fatal. I describe the space that materializes in the phenomenal field between text and reader, and where the constitution of possibility becomes visible. This is typically seen in the rupture that is the event, where the event in itself offers a moment of release and epistemic certainty to the characters. I argue that through this release and certainty the characters obtain a radical, audacious sense of freedom and intensity of life. The stories examined have been grouped in a conceptual order that brings into view the central qualities of Munro’s fiction such as lightness, newness and sameness. These qualities are related to the act of recognition; they are elaborated through readings of a large number of stories from all the collections, including three stories published recently in The New Yorker. The dissertation concludes by highlighting these qualities in the tour de force “Post and Beam.” I argue finally that Alice Munro’s fiction recognizes life as possibility in a moment when it shows itself in its own remarkable sameness