MINISTRY OF EDUCATION AND SCIENCE OF UKRAINE

Borys Grinchenko Kyiv University

Institute of Philology

English Philology Department

VERBALIZATION OF REALITY AND MEMORIES IN SHORT STORIES

BY ALICE MUNRO

Bachelor Paper
Tetiana Movchan
Group FAb-3-14

Research supervisor
PhD, Associate Professor V.V. Yakuba

Kyiv 2018
 МІНІСТЕРСТВО ОСВІТИ І НАУКИ УКРАЇНИ

Київський університет імені Бориса Грінченка

Інститут філології

Кафедра англійської філології та перекладу

Бакалаврська робота на тему

ВЕРБАЛІЗАЦІЯ РЕАЛЬНОСТІ ТА СПОГАДІВ У КОРОТКИХ
ОПОВІДАННЯХ ЕЛІС МАНРО

Мовчан Тетяни Олександрівни

Група ФАб-3-14.4.0д 

Науковий керівник
к.ф.н., доцент
Якуба В.В.

Київ 2018

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 CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION.....................................................................................................4

CHAPTER 1. Approaches to the analysis of A. Monro's work................................7

1.1. About the author..............................................................................................7

1.2. Writing style overview....................................................................................8

CHAPTER 2. Verbalization of the past in “Too Much Happiness” collection......12

2.1. Verbal description of memories in the short story “Dimensions”................12

2.2. Past and present in short stories “Face” and “Child’s Play”.........................16

2.3. Past and present in the “Wenlock Edge” story..............................................20

CHAPTER 3. Verbalization of the reality in “Too Much Happiness” collection...23

3.1. The impact of the past on the present in “Fiction” story...............................23

3.2. The impact of the past on the present in “Deep-holes” story........................27

3.3. The reality and the fiction in the “Free radicals” story.................................30

3.4. Flashbacks into the past in short stories “Too much happiness” and “Some
women”................................................................................................................34

CONCLUSION.......................................................................................................44

REFERENCES........................................................................................................46

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 INTRODUCTION

Despite the short story has become an increasingly important genre since the
mid-nineteenth century, it is difficult, in fact, to name very many writers of note
whose careers and reputations have rested solely on short fiction. In English, the
list would not run much beyond Katherine Mansfield, Frank O’Connor, Donald
Barthelme, Raymond Carver, Amy Hempel and Alice Munro [Hunter]. In the
research paper presented, we focus on Alice Munro’s books. Alice Munro is
considered by many to be the finest short story writer now working in English.
Munro is a rare thing among writers of short fiction, an international bestseller.
She is also widely acclaimed in the academy, and her work has been the subject of
several critical monographs, which have been used as the theoretical sources for
the course paper presented, titled “Verbalization of reality and memories in short
stories by A. Munro”.
Among the sources, the book of Coral Howells should be mentioned. This
book examines the appeal of Munro’s narratives of small-town Canadian life with
their precise attention to social surfaces and their fascination with local gossips.
This is a world of open secrets, and Howells highlights Munro’s distinguishing
storytelling techniques which unite the familiar and the unfamiliar, slipping
between reality and imagination to make visible what is usually hidden within
everyday life. The book “Dance of the sexes: art and gender in the fiction of Alice
Munro” by Beverly Rasporich has also been used as the theoretical basis for the
analysis. The book considers Alice Munro's narratives from a gender point of view.
Beverly Rasporich examines Munro as folk artist, ironist, and regionalist in
relation to her femaleness and feminism. Among the other theoretical materials,
works of the following linguists and theorists have been involved: Robert Thacker,
Peter Stich, Jean Mallinson, Alex Keegan, Adrian Hunter, Helen Hoy, Robert
Howard, Garan Holcombe, Mary Gervais, Margaret Atwood and others.
There has been very little research carried out on the stories of Munro in the
Ukrainian universities. Among those, who dedicated their works to the
4
investigation of Munro’s narratives, we should mention Olga Manailova, who
examines the peculiarities of the narration style on the basis of the story “Free
Radicals” from the collected stories “Too Much Happines”; O. Tarnavsky, who
claims A. Munro is the best short stories author of the contemporary world; O.A.
Fedosiyk and S.H. Filushkina, who analyse the main female characters of Munro’s
stories etc. Taking into account that A. Munro is considered one of the best modern
short stories writer, that is important to investigate her input in the literature
development.
The aim of the research is to figure out A. Munro’s storytelling style.
In order to achieve the aim, it is necessary to fulfil the following research
tasks:
 to investigate approaches to the analysis of storytelling style of the
author;
 to give a general overview of author’s collections of short stories;
 to characterize the style of verbalization of past on the basis of the
collection “Too much happiness” by A. Munro;
 to study the style of verbalization of past and present on the basis of the
collection “Too much happiness” by A. Munro.
The object of the research is A. Munro’s short stories narration style.
The subject of the research is verbalization of time in A. Munro’s narration.
The material of the research is based on the original prose work of the
brightest representatives of contemporary female literature author - A. Munro.
Alice Munro is considered the best author of short stories in the world for
already forty years. The work presented maybe considered of a theoretical value
due to the fact that it provides a thorough analysis of A. Munro’s style of time
verbalization on the basis of one of the most popular collection “Too much
happiness”.
The practical significance of the work lies in the fact that obtained results
may serve as theoretical and practical materials in teaching theoretical courses
from stylistics, lexicology, English literature theory, courses and practical classes
5
of English teaching, special courses in linguoculturology, and also may be used for
writing of course papers, diplomas and master's works about the interpretation of
the literary text.
The structure of the research work. The work consists of the following
parts: Introduction, 3 Chapters, Conclusion and List of used literature. The
Introduction presents the problems, which are investigated and discussed in the
work, points out the aim of this research, tasks of the work, scientific novelty,
theoretical value, practical value and other peculiarities and features of the research
work. Chapter I investigates approaches to the analysis of A. Munro’s narration
style. Chapter II presents practical analysis of verbalization of the past in the
collection “Too much happiness”. Chapter III contains the analysis of
verbalization of the present due to the impact of past in the same collection. In the
Conclusion we pointed out the most important findings of our investigation. The
List of used literature presents the names of the authors and their books, which
were used for writing this research work.

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 CHAPTER 1. Approaches to the analysis of A. Monro's work

1.1. About the author

Alice Munro is among the major writers of English fiction of the
contemporary time. She’s been awarded armfuls of super-superlatives by critics in
both North America and the United Kingdom, she’s got a lot of awards, and she
has a faithful international readership.
Born as Alice Ann Laidlaw on July 10, 1931, Alice Munro grew up in the
reticent Scots-Irish community of Wingham, Ontario, which is situated in the area
around Huron County. This region came to be known as Alice Munro country
because the majority of her stories are set in this remote region full of the “horror
of disclosure”, described by Catherine Sheldrick Ross as “the last place to want to
celebrate itself or have its secrets exposed” [Ross; 21]. Since childhood, Munro
was fascinated by literature and passionate to become a writer.
She had begun writing stories as a teenager, and she persevered in her
attempt to establish herself as a writer despite years of rejection from publishers
and the limitations imposed on her career by the responsibilities of marriage and
motherhood. Her first collection of stories was published as Dance of the Happy
Shades (1968). It is one of three of her collections—the other two being Who Do
You Think You Are? (1978; also published as The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and
Rose) and The Progress of Love (1986)—awarded the annual Governor General’s
Literary Award for fiction. Lives of Girls and Women (1971) was conceived as
a novel but developed into a series of interrelated coming-of-age stories. Like
much of her fiction, the tales capture the social and cultural milieu of her native
southwestern Ontario. Munro embraced the mystery, intimacy, and tension of the
ordinary lives of both men and women, rooted in the uncharted and ambivalent
landscape of what affectionately came to be known as “Munro country” [Thacker;
11-24].

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 In 2009, Alice Munro’s “Too Much Happiness” collection appears. It is a
collection of 10 stories, where the author represents complicated, strenuous
incidents and feelings into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways in
which people adapt and often transcend what happens in their lives. In the former
story a young wife and mother gets emancipation from the insufferable pain of
losing her three children from a most astonishing source. In another narrative, a
young woman, in the aftermath of an unusual and humiliating seduction, reacts in a
clever if less-than-admirable fashion. Other narratives uncover the “deep-holes” in
a marriage, the sudden cruelty of children, and how a boy’s disfigured face
provides both the good things in his life and the bad. And in the long title story,
readers accompany Sophia Kovalevsky—a late-nineteenth-century Russian
emigrant and mathematician—on a winter journey that takes her from the Riviera,
where she visits her lover, to Paris, Germany, and, Denmark, where she has a
fateful meeting with a local doctor, and finally to Sweden, where she teaches at the
only university in Europe willing to employ a female mathematician. All the
stories are about different lives, but, all of them are connected by a special
individual style of A. Munro.

1.2. Writing style overview

As a leading writer of modern social realism and short story, Munro’s
unique short story writing style has attracted the critical attention of a wide range
of critics and Munro scholars across the globe in the literary world. They have read
her stories and interpreted from different viewpoints. Alice Munro has been hailed
by various critics as a "realist" [Bowering; 4], a "super-realist" [Gervais; 9], and a
"visionary documentary writer" [Mallinson; 70]. Many critics have asserted that
Munro's stories often have the emotional and literary depth of novels. Some have
asked whether Munro actually writes short stories or novels. Alex Keegan gave a
simple answer: "Who cares? In most Munro stories there is as much as in many
novels" [Keegan].

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 Her sentences are brief and crisp. Her prose has a certain no-nonsense
quality about it; it is down to earth, matter-of-fact. Readers of Munro’s stories are
left with the impression of ordinary happenings in an everyday world supported by
a fine sense of detail. Even when her themes are dark they are composed with the
clarity of a cloudless western Ontario winter day. In this respect Munro seems to
defy Aristotle’s claim that literature is closer to truth than history because the
writer can disregard the contingencies of actual events and centre intuition upon
what is essential in the human condition reflected in imaginary or legendary
characters and events. Yet Munro’s style is but the bezel in which the jewel of her
art is set [Stich; 163].
Margaret Atwood, discussing the style of Munro’s stories, says: “Dreariness
of spirit” is one of the great Munro enemies. Her characters do battle with it in
every way they can, fighting against stifling mores and other people’s deadening
expectations and imposed rules of behaviour, and every possible kind of muffling
and spiritual smothering. Given a choice between being a person who does good
works but has inauthentic feelings and is numb at heart and one who behaves badly
but is true to what she really feels and is thus alive to herself, a Munro woman is
likely to choose the latter; or, if she chooses the former, she will then comment on
her own slipperiness, guile, wiliness, slyness, and perversity. Honesty, in Munro’s
work, is not the best policy: it is not a policy at all, but an essential element, like
air. The characters must get hold of at least some of it, by fair means or foul, or—
they feel—they will go under [Atwood].
One Alice Munro short story has the power of many novels. Analyzing
Munro's style of writing one may note that nothing is wasted, and there is nothing
irrelevant. In her short stories, every word carries an important meaning, and is
able to grab the shape and mood, the flavor of a life in 30 pages. In her stories, she
explains what it is to be a human being, and, at the end of one of the stories one
has to pause, catch the breath, come up for air. Everything in Alice Munro’s fiction
is tinged with irony. There is the possibility of failure, hope, redemption and
despair, but only the possibility, the suggestion. Nothing is ever fixed, nothing is
9
closed off or closed down. It is in this treatment of the essential imperfection of life
and its failure to conform to the quick of our fantasies, that Munro achieves
greatness. Alice Munro, as Robert Howard claims, has done more than any living
writer to demonstrate that the short story is an art form and not the poor relation of
the novel [Howard].
Munro’s stories usually take place in a small-town rural Ontario, where she
has lived for much of her life. Her personages often leave the boundaries of the
country for an intellectual and creative existence in the city, find that they have
become entrap within an undesired domesticity, which forces them into pale
versions of themselves, and then, in later life once more feel the pulse to break
free. Yet the recurrent and very personal topics of Munro’s fiction – the excitation
of the creative impulse, the bohemian rejection of provincial anonymity and
conservatism, the refusal to be bound by narrow definitions of womanhood, and
the complexity of female sexuality – are not what make her work so outstanding
and prominent. For that one has to look to her style. Munro’s way with form, the
rambling chronology of her stories, captures the drift of reader's thoughts, the
endless movement in and out of moments. A Munro sentence, attractive in its
clarity, irresistible in its accuracy, tempting in its simplicity, offers constant
fascination. Munro’s prose, without sentiment, yet suffused with a hard
melancholy, has a composed, wry, crystalline grace [Howard].
Munro has talked about ‘the complexity of things, the things within things’.
It is her natural ability to describe the ‘shameless, marvellous, shattering absurdity’
of life, to express it in just the right way, to capture it in all its endless, shapeless
strangeness, which makes her so good. She has an acute sensitivity to the treasons,
duplicities, evasions, snatched passions, tendernesses, compromises, commitments
and pained avowals of human relationships. She teases the surface, until all that is
hidden, all those tucked away pivots of a life, are revealed. In her stories, there are
no neat endings, no straightforward progressions, no character arcs. There is a
detachment from the crude mechanics of bold brushstrokes. Munro’s palate is
infinitely subtle, with modulations of tone and colour that unsettle, surprise and
10
delight. Munro finds the extraordinary within the ordinary, and reveals life to be a
layering of secrets and lies, a meshing together of disparate elements. She shows
us that we can never truly know anyone.
Munro's narrators are philosophical, melancholic, at an ironic distance from
their own lives. The classic Munro’s narrator is a woman in opposition to her
family, her home town, her upbringing, a woman seeking her own kind of order.
Munro’s narrators have an eloquent intelligence, a controlled ferocity of spirit.
They possess, at centre, a sense of disquiet, an amused despairing wonder at the
knowledge of the way life is tainted by its brevity and unexpected twists.
Garan Holcomb mentions that Alice Munro’s style resembles Anton
Chekov’s one in a number of ways. She is fascinated with the failings of love and
work and has an obsession with time; there is the same penetrating psychological
insight; the events played out in a minor key; the small town settings. In Munro’s
fictional universe, as in Chekhov’s, plot is of secondary importance: all is based on
the epiphanic moment, the sudden enlightenment, concise, subtle, revelatory detail.
Another significant feature of Munro’s is connection to the land, to what Margaret
Atwood has called a ‘harsh and vast geography.’ Munro is attuned to the shifts and
colours of the natural world, to life lived with the wilderness. Her skill at
describing the constituency of the environment is equal to her ability to get below
the surface of the lives of her characters [Holcomb].
Helen Hoy claims that Munro's prose reveals the ambiguities of life: "ironic
and serious at the same time," "mottoes of godliness and honor and flaming
bigotry," "special, useless knowledge," "tones of shrill and happy outrage," "the
bad taste, the heartlessness, the joy of it." Her style places the fantastic next to the
ordinary, with each undercutting the other in ways that simply and effortlessly
evoke life [Hoy].  As Robert Thacker wrote: Munro's writing creates... an
empathetic union among readers, critics most apparent among them. We are drawn
to her writing by its verisimilitude – not of mimesis, so-called and... 'realism' – but
rather the feeling of being itself... of just being a human being.” [Thacker]

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 Last Munro’s works have inevitably shifted focus of late. Hateship,
Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage (2001) shows the effect of memories
arriving as jolts to the present. There is the failure of mind and body and the
constraints of loneliness. The final story, 'The Bear Came Over the Mountain',
recently filmed as Away From Her by Sarah Polley, begins as a story about the
onset of Alzheimer’s. With Munro’s sure command of detail, pace, and the
incremental revelation of past incidents, it gradually becomes an incredibly
powerful examination of betrayal and the many varieties of love. Munro shows the
pull of the past, exploring the pressing and urgent need to make our own personal
myths as the drift of the years begins to narrow the future [Holcomb].
To conclude, by the early 1980s, Alice Munro was recognized as being
among Canada’s leading writers. She is considered to be a figure whose work
deserved and rewarded close analysis. In her collections Alice Munro embraced
the mystery, intimacy, and tension both men and women. In her stories ordinary
happenings in an everyday world supported by a fine sense of detail. There are no
neat endings, no straightforward progressions, no character arcs. She shows us that
we can never truly know anyone. Her last stories were focused of late. There we
can observe the effect of memories.
In the work presented we will investigate the style of Munro’s writing on the
basis of her short stories from the collection “Too much happiness”. The following
chapter is dedicated to the practical analysis of the collection.

12
 CHAPTER 2. Verbalization of past and present in “Too Much Happiness”
collection

2.1. Verbal description of memories in the short story “Dimensions”

Munro's stories in the collection “To much happiness” usually start at some
unexpected point, moving forward and backward, and focusing on one event from
the hero's life. This maybe exemplified on the basis of the first story in the
collection, titled “Dimensions”, saying the story about 23 years old protagonist,
lonely and depressed, whose abusive husband Lloyd suffocated their children
Sasha, Barbara Ann, and Dmitri. Doree is socially and emotionally isolated. Her
view on happiness and marriage is shattered, and she becomes deeply depressed
after her children's murder.
Leading an endless inner monologue, Doree infinitely lose the record:
memories of childhood, marriage, children, work etc. The story starts somewhere
at the bus, on her way to London, she had to take three buses to get to the end point
of her trip. It seems that the bus, in the story, signifies a link between Doree and
her husband Lloyd; it signifies the memories that plague her mind. Doree
accurately describes her feelings she felt on her way: On the first bus she was not
too troubled. Just riding along and looking at the scenery [Munro; 7]; On the
second bus she began to feel jittery, and she couldn’t help trying to guess which of
the women around her might be bound for the same place [Munro; 7]; On the third
bus she got a seat by the window and tried to keep herself calm by reading the
signs-both the advertising and street signs [Munro; 7].
Doree remembers everything randomly, not in order, jumping from the day
she meets Lloyd to her first day meeting Mrs. Sands. Her old life is not described
fluidly. From Doree’s memories readers get to know just the story of her family
13
life, starting from the very beginning. The narration hops back 7 years: When
Doree was sixteen-that was seven years ago-she’d gone to visit her mother in the
hospital every day after school [Munro; 8]. At the hospital, Doree met Lloyd, an
orderly man who took care about her after Doree’s mother died, and “By her next
birthday she was pregnant, then married” [Munro; 9]. Author provides readers
with information about heroes’ lives after the marriage: they move to countryside,
by picking a name on the map, Lloyd got a job, they planted a garden, their first
child Sasha was born. At first, everything seems normal, they experience the same
family issues as each new family overcome. Being involved into the story,
suddenly, readers are back to the present, and they meet Mrs. Sands, without really
being told who she is and her relationship to Doree, but they can glean from the
description of their interaction that she is acting as a counselor to Doree.  Mrs.
Sands and Doree have a conversation about Doree’s visits with Lloyd – his
appearance, his manner. This conversation leads again to Doree’s memories, to the
past event that happened. Munro moves back to the family narrative.  
After a few happy years, their life has changed. When Lloyd discovered that
Doree was feeding their baby with a supplementary bottle, he was angry: He
called her a liar. They fought. He said that she was a whore like her mother
[Munro; 18]. Soon they made up, but each time Dimitri was capricious, or he had a
cold, or was crying, the refusal of breast-feeding was recalled. Later, readers
understand that was the first call of the coming catastrophe. As the story enfolds,
the tension between Lloyd and Doree escalates.
In general, Lloyd abuses Doree constantly, and she slowly comes to terms
with that fact. Lloyd wants their kids to be educated at home, because he wanted
them to be close to their parents and to be introduced to the world carefully and
gradually, rather than thrown into it all at once: “I just happen to think they are my
kids,” he said. “I mean, they are our kids, not the Department of Education’s
kids.” [Munro; 21]. He did not trust medical professionals, he did not like to have
friends, he calls the only friend of Doree “Lezzie” and demands to know what they
talk about.  He tries to convince Doree that Maggie is trying to separate them:
14
“She’ll get you over there bawling and whining about what a bastard I am.  One
of these days” [Munro; 11]. Doree was absolutely controlled by Lloyd, physically
and mentally: she was even allowed to laugh with him, as long as she wasn’t the
one who started the laughing [Munro; 9]. She is willing to tolerate his paranoia, his
put-downs, his disapprovals, his smug offenses because she is scared of losing
him, scared of losing the one thing in her life that held any meaning for her. Even
after the murder, she kept going back to see Lloyd, out of habit, rather than want.
Lloyd’s words about Maggie seems paranoid. It seems they prove its
prophecy as Doree does leave Lloyd and goes to Maggie late one night when she is
unable to “scare him out of his craziness” [Munro; 18]. This sets the stage for the
climax of the story which is both quite believable and haunting in its stark detail.
The line “It got worse, gradually. No direct forbidding, but more criticism”
opens the paragraph that will finally lead to the climax of the story, the tragic
event that Munro has been preparing readers for. Doree goes back to that day,
when she was brought home by Meggie. She enters home and sees her children
killed. Lloyd smothered them “to save them the misery”, “The misery of knowing
that their mother had walked out on them”. These words have burned into Doree’s
brain. Having made readers impressed, she goes to her conversation with Lloyd,
where she tries to explain him she did not leave the family: “You told me to stop
contradicting you or get out of the house. So I got out of the house. I only went to
Maggie’s for one night. I fully intended to come back. I wasn’t walking out on
anybody”. Readers are not informed about Lloyd arguments, and, there is no
need in them as his answer cannot change the results. Thus, author leads readers
to the earlier events which caused the tragedy, as Doree “remembered perfectly
how the argument had started”.
At the end of the story, Doree explains the real reason for her visits to Lloyd:
Who but Lloyd would remember the children’s names now, or the color of their
eyes. Mrs. Sands, when she had to mention them, did not even call them children
but “your family,” putting them in one clump together. Going to meet Lloyd in
those days, lying to Laurie, she had felt no guilt, only a sense of destiny,
15
submission. She had felt that she was put on earth for no reason other than to be
with him and to try to understand him” [Munro]. Now, everything is explained,
and author goes back to the reality, to the current place that Doree is now: She
was sitting in the front seat across from the driver [Munro].
The story ends in a beautiful redemptive moment when on the way out to the
hospital again, Doree sees a pickup truck crash on the road in front of the bus. She
and the bus driver get out, and go across. The bus driver calls for an ambulance,
but it seems the teenage driver of the pickup truck is not breathing. Kneeling
beside him, Doree remembers how her husband taught her when they were
married. She is able to get the boy breathing again. Because other drivers have now
stopped, the bus driver wants to keep going to the institution, but Doree decides to
stay with the boy until the ambulance arrives. She no longer has any desire to visit
the institution again. At this moment, bus again is a symbol, but now, it is the
symbol of freedom. When Doree gets off the bus, she tears the connections with
Lloyd.
Summarizing the analysis, we may say that the main structure of the story is
unusual due to constant flashbacks of the main character, because the climax
occurs approximately halfway through the story with the denouement taking up the
final half. Most of the story is about the past events, despite they are flashbacks of
the main hero in present. By alternating the aftermath story with the flashbacks,
Munro is able to sustain the reader’s suspense as she engages in her psychological
explorations of her characters’ inner lives. Munro once again renders complex,
difficult events and emotions into stories that shed light on the unpredictable ways
in which men and women accommodate and often transcend what happens in their
lives.

2.2. Past and present in short stories “Face” and “Child’s Play”
In her short stories “Face” and “Child’s Play” from the collection “Too much
happiness” Alice Munro uses her particular style of writing, making her heroes to

16
travel into the past to explain their present. She focuses on the intricate effects that
a childhood event can have on adult life.
The story “Face” is told through the first person narration, who reveals his life
story from the day of his birth. The unnamed narrator of the story is born with a
birthmark covering almost the entirety of one side of his face, and that was the
reason his father did not accept him. The other story, titled “Child’s Play” is also
told through the first person narrator, but readers know the name of the hero
-Marlene. Marlene tells a story of her child trip to camp, where she met her friend
Charlene. That camp has changed their lives. Both stories starts from description of
past events, step by step approaching to the present.
The story “Face” is like a retrospective, although the interval from which it is
told is not made instantly clear. The act of looking back is handled specifically,
with fragments of present tense that occasionally return the reader to the narrator’s
present frame of mind, while most of the story is told in past tense, because the
events being recalled occurred when he was a child and, later, a college student.
Most of the story “Face” is described from the past perspective. The bigger part of
his life has been described within 2 pages, and the rest pages have been dedicated
to one event, called the “Great Drama” of his life. The narrator hesitates and feels
awkward on the way to remembering this great drama, confessing during one such
deviation, "how I circle and dither around this subject” [Munro; 61]. Yet, step by
step, he recalls an afternoon when he and his first love Nancy are eight years old,
and they and exploring the cellar. They find some old jars of paint and brushes.
The boy begins to paint something on the wall with paint, while the little girl "had
her back to me and was wielding the paintbrush on herself" [Munro; 63]. Using a
flashy red color paint, she has painted her face to match his face. She was
"overjoyed, as if she had managed something magical" [Munro; 64] and asks
"Now do I look like you?" [Munro; 63]. The narrator is horrified and feels this as an
insult. He does not understand that the girl loves him, even with this birthmark.
Her action forces him to remember something he wishes forgot, despite she loves
this part of him that he cannot accept. Although this tale is told in a conversational
17
style, we witness a man in the process of remembering a significant event, the one
love of his life. Munro skillfully sketches a man's memory as it struggles and
moves by indirection to an event he can neither bear to remember or forget.
Almost all that is in the story described happens in the past, but, there is also
action in the present. The narrator, while gardening, is stung on the eyelid by a
wasp. He manages to drive himself to the hospital, but is kept overnight because
his eyes are bandaged (to prevent strain) and while he is in bed he is visited by
someone who offers to read to him. In fact, it seems, he is having a dream, in
which he is able to recite volumes of poetry—which, since he was a radio actor,
maybe he would be able to do, but it seemed like fantasy. In this story author
jumps between memories, focusing at past, but a single jump to present shows how
those past events influenced the narrator’s life.
In the “Child’s Play”, the narrator, Marlene, is reflecting upon an incident
from her childhood, which happened in the camp, where she met her friend
Charlene. Then, her memories go even further, and she tells a story about a
strange mentally disabled girl Verna, who lived nearby her and who frightened
Marlene. Marlene has an aversion to her from the very first day she saw her,
explaining that she “hated her as some people hate snakes or caterpillars or mice
or slugs. For no decent reason. Not for any certain harm she could do but for the
way she could disturb your innards and make you sick of your life” [Munro; 200].
Right after the story Marlene recalls a summer camp again, mentioning that Verna
also visited that camp 2 days before the end, and shortly describes her further life.
Almost at the end of the story, we are reading about present, not about Marlene’s
memories. In present, Marlene is a pensioner; she gets a letter from Charlene with
a request to visit her dying in the hospital. This visit puts readers again into
Marlene’s memories about the camp, and the climax of the story happens: the
children murder Verna. Verna drowned in cold water. 
It is mentioned in the story that Verna has done nothing to enrage the narrator,
but she acts somewhat strangely, for instance, she “could stay in one place longer
than anybody I ever knew, staring at just one thing” [Munro; 197]. Also, her
18
origins are unknown, “she appeared in the summer before I was to start school”
[Munro; 194]. The narrator is aware of the fact that her hatred is unfounded, she
repeatedly justifies herself, for instance by saying: “Children of course are
monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-centre, out of
whack, unmanageable” [Munro; 195]. Almost till the end of the story the reader
does not know of the guilt that binds the two friends through the rest of their lives,
though they never see each other after camp. The second half of the flashback –
the drowning scene – comes at the very end, after Marlene receives a cryptic letter
from her friend on her deathbed, wanting her to seek a Catholic priest in her
hometown. Readers are baffled by this last request, and assume Marlene is also,
until they see her trying to find the priest what means she understood why it was
so necessary for Charlene to talk to him before the death.
After the visit to the church, Marlene is unable to do anything. Sitting in her
car, the past comes to the surface again, and suddenly the narrative returns to the
final day of summer camp. It is then revealed that in all the turmoil of parents
arriving and children getting out of the water, Marlene and Charlene drowned
Verna after the attack of a big wave coming from a motor boat: “There was a
tumult of screaming and shouting all around, and this increased as the lesser
waves arrived and people who had somehow missed the first attack pretended to
be knocked over by the second. Verna’s head did not break the surface, though
now she was not inert, but turning in a leisurely way, light as a jellyfish in the
water. Charlene and I had our hands on her, on her rubber cap” [Munro; 221].
And some lines further: Charlene and I kept our eyes on each other, rather than
looking down at what our hands were doing. Her eyes were wide and gleeful, as I
suppose mine were too. I don’t think we felt wicked, triumphing in our
wickedness. More as if we were doing just what was – amazingly – demanded of
us, as if this was the absolute high point, the culmination, in our lives, of our
being ourselves [Munro; 222]. She and Charlene already left before anybody
discovered Verna’s body. They both made a silent agreement not to keep up with
each other, in order not to be reminded of their terrible act. Nevertheless, Marlene
19
never says they killed Verna, but she never denies it:  “I am sure we never said
anything as banal, as insulting or unnecessary as Don’t Tell.” [Munro].
Comparing “Face” and “Child’s Play” stories, we may say, that the only thing that
makes them similar- is the style of revealing the climax. In “Face” the narrator is
mostly in past, from time to time coming back to the present day; in “Child’s
Play”, main character is also in her memories the bigger part of the story, and,
goes back to present just at the end of the story, but this present also make her to
go back to past events. In both stories, narrators tell a story based on memories
from their childhood. Jumping from one past event to another, the characters tell
their stories, but not at once. They describe some preconditions that happened in
their childhood, than describe how their life went, and then they discover the truth,
the events in their childhood which changed their life forever.

2.3. Past and present in the “Wenlock Edge” story

The story “Wenlock Edge” is told through the first person narration, who reveals
his life story from the day of entering university.
The narrator starts talking about her cousin: “His own name was Ernie Botts. He
was a tall florid man with a good-natured expression, a big square face, and fair
curly hair springing straight up from his forehead. His hands, his fingernails,
were as clean as soap, and his hips were a little plump. My name for him-when he
was not around-was Earnest Bottom” [Munro; 75]. They had a custom of having
dinner every Sunday evening. Moving forward we can see her students life and
conditions she lives in: “My room was the attic of an old house, with a large floor
space and not much headroom. But being the former maid’s quarters, it had its
own bathroom. On the second floor were the rooms occupied by two other
scholarship students, who were in their final year in Modern Languages. Their
names were Kay and Beverly. In the high-ceilinged but chopped-up rooms
downstairs lived a medical student, who was hardly ever home, and his wife, Beth,
who was home all the time, because she had two very young children” [Munro;

20
77]. So narrator shows us her life in the past as we can understand from the
context.
The action of the story starts when the narrator and Nina meet. Nina “was small,
and thoughtful in her movements-she never bumped her head against the rafters,
as I did. She spent a lot of her time sitting cross-legged on the daybed, her
brownish-blond hair falling over her face, a Japanese kimono loose over her
childish white underwear. She had beautiful clothes-a camel’s hair coat, cashmere
sweaters, a pleated tartan skirt with a large silver pin. Just the sort of clothes you
would see in a magazine layout, with the heading: “Outfitting Your Junior Miss
for Her New Life on Campus.” But the moment she got back from the college she
discarded her costume for the kimono” [Munro; 80].

The two become friends, “Nina was twenty-two years old and this was what
had happened to her since she was fifteen:
“First, she had gotten herself pregnant (that was how she put it) and married
the father, who wasn’t much older than she was”, “she had a second baby,
another boy”, “she left both the children with her grandmother and took the bus
to Chicago’, “on the bus she met a girl named Marcy who like her was headed for
Chicago”, “Nina met Mr. Purvis. It was he in fact who gave her the name Nina.
Before that she had been June. She went to live in Mr. Purvis’s place in Chicago”
[Munro; 82].
Nina has a troubled past and now, a controlling and older lover she calls Mr.
Purvis. Purvis has agreed to let her have the college experience but is also having
her followed by his employee, Mrs. Winner “Her hair was not white, but
platinum blond, a color that to me certified a hard heart, immoral dealings, a
long bumpy ride through the sordid back alleys of life” [Munro; 89]. One evening,
the narrator and Nina decide to venture out and test Mrs. Winner's ability to keep
up. They arrive at the city library, where they run into Ernie, who offers to drive
the girls home. It was the first time Nina and Ernie met. The reader don’t suspect

21
their further relationships. So we can see that actions develop rapidly in the
narrator’s past life.
One Friday, Nina complains about feeling poorly. She wants to stay put for
the weekend rather than return to Mr. Purvis's residence. The narrator phones Mr.
Purvis on Nina's behalf, and finds herself invited to dinner, which she accepts at
Nina's urging: “If he asks you to go and eat with him tomorrow night, why don’t
you go? There’s always something good to eat on Saturday nights, it’s special”
[Munro; 88].
Before the dinner the strange situation happened. The Narrator is asked to
remove her clothes. “It had never occurred to me that Mr. Purvis might be
waiting in the same naked condition as myself, and he was not. He wore a dark
blue blazer, a white shirt, an ascot scarf (I did not know it was called that), and
gray slacks. He was hardly taller than I was, and he was thin and old, mostly
bald, and with wrinkles in his forehead when he smiled” [Munro; 91].
After the meal, he asks the narrator to read to him from A Shropshire
Lad, including the poem ''On Wenlock Edge.'' “It wasn’t really that I forgot
where I was or who I was with or in what condition I sat there. But I had come to
feel somewhat remote and philosophical. The notion came to me that everybody in
the world was naked, in a way. Mr. Purvis was naked, though he wore clothes.
We were all sad, bare, forked creatures. Shame receded” [Munro; 97].
This moment always will stay in the mind of the narrator, up to her present
life. Here we can see the present emotions which were caused from her past: “I
would always be reminded of what I had agreed to do. Not been forced, not
ordered, not even persuaded. Agreed to do” [Munro; 105]. “I would never think
of those lines again without feeling the prickles of the upholstery on my bare
haunches. The sticky prickly shame. A far greater shame it seemed now, than at
the time. He had done something to me, after all” [Munro; 104].
Later we can see that Nina is at Ernie's house ant they are the couple: “What
do you want to talk about the past for? Don’t make me sick. That’s all dead and

22
gone. It doesn’t matter to me and Ernest. We’re together now. We’re in love now”
[Munro; 103].
We find out that while the narrator is in the library, she mails to Mr. Purvis
Earnie’s address so he can find Nina. Is it revenge or spite? She remarks about
people in the campus “On their way to deeds they didn’t know they had in them”
[Munro; 108].
To conclude we can notice that Munro uses particular style of writing, making her
heroes to travel into the past to explain their present. The examples are “Face” and
“Child’s Play” stories. They are based on memories from their childhood. The
author also accurately jumps from the memories from the past to the present
situation which was caused by events took part in the childhood. In the “Wenlock
Edge” story the events develop rapidly in the past. They are the cause of narrator’s
prickly shame

23
 CHAPTER 3. Verbalization of the reality in “Too Much Happiness”
collection
3.1. The impact of the past on the present in “Fiction” story
The “Fiction” story opens describing Jon and Joyce, a quite happy couple
living a basic life in a fictional town Rough River on Canada’s west coast.  Joyce
and Jon met at high school and despite of their high IQ’s and the high expectations
their parents had of their future, they ran off together in their fist year at college
and got jobs here and there, called hippies by their parents. After a while, wanting
more security, Jon learned carpentry and woodworking and Joyce started to teach
music in schools. They bought a dilapidated house in Rough River and renovated it
themselves. When Jon’s woodworking business was growing more successful,
Joyce persuaded Jon to take an apprentice to help him – “at first he hadn’t been
willing, but Joyce had talked him into it” [Munro; 35] – something she will come
to regret later on.
In “Fiction” story, the third person narrator is mostly focused on the past
events. A kind of exposition is present, with highly condensed retrospective views
of Joyce and Jon’s school days, when they met, and how they both dropped out of
college after their first year and traveled the North American continent. The
author depicts the story of Jon and Joyce, gradually moving to their divorce, and
finally readers arrive at the present where Joyce comes face to face with someone

24
from her past, which leads to something of an epiphany for her and forces to
rummage in the memory.
The story is divided into 2 parts. Finishing the first one, writer shows how
deeply Joyce is injured with her divorce: “Her life gone. A commonplace
calamity” [40; Munro]. Joyce moves from their house into an apartment in town,
hoping in vain that Jon might come back to her—instead, Edie moves in with him,
together with her daughter Christine. Joyce is now exceptionally active in her job
as a music teacher and, moreover, tries to appeal to everyone, especially men—yet
all her actions, as her focalising perspective betrays, are geared towards Jon,
whom, lacking alternatives, she tries to impress in this manner: She had some idea
that Jon would hear about how pretty she looked, how sexy and happy, how she
was simply bowling over all the men. As soon as she went out of the apartment
she was on stage, and Jon was the essential, if second-hand, spectator [Munro;
40-41]. Edie’s daughter Christine is Joyce’s student and a participant in the recital
at the end of the school year, this time prepared with special zeal—Joyce hopes
Jon and Edie will attend the concert. She prepares for the concert carefully: “Even
with the youngest or the dullest children she taught, her tone had become
caressing, full of mischievous laughter, her encouragement irresistible. She was
preparing her pupils for the recital held at the conclusion of the school year. She
had not previously been enthusiastic about this evening of public performance-
she had felt that it interfered with the progress of those students who had ability,
it shoved them into a situation they were not ready for. All that effort and tension
could only create false values. But this year she was throwing herself into every
aspect of the show. The program, the lighting, the introductions, and of course the
performances. This ought to be fun, she proclaimed. Fun for the students, fun for
the audience. Of course she counted on Jon’s being there. Edie’s daughter was
one of the performers, so Edie would have to be there. Jon would have to
accompany Edie [Munro]. She expects Jon and Edie to visit the concert, and to
see how perfectly Joyce prepared children, how beautiful she was, but “Jon and

25
Edie were not in the audience” [Munro; 134]. With these words the first part is
finished.
The story’s second part begins with an abrupt leap in time and place: “Joyce
and Matt are giving a party at their house in North Vancouver” [Munro; 135].
This part is set in the present days, when Joyce is a middle-aged woman and
married to Matt. To celebrate his sixty-fifth birthday they are giving a party, at
which Joyce meets a girl named Christie O’Dell, of which she had the uncanny
feeling that “she had seen that face before” [Munro; 49]. It appears that Christie is
a young writer and a couple of days later Joyce buys her first book, “How Are We
to Live”. When Joyce at night goes through the table of contents, one particular
title catches her eye: ‘Kindertotenlieder’. This is a song cycle by Gustav Mahler,
and being a music teacher, Joyce immediately feels attracted to this story.
However, while reading, it begins to dawn on her that the story is about her own
past. Munro presents the story to readers partly as a tale within the tale.
The story, written by Christie, makes Joyce to go back to her memories, to
compare what she remembers and how the things have been seen by a small child.
The girl is infatuated with the music teacher who is oblivious to this fact and tries
to use the girl to get information about the relationship of her ex-partner with the
girl’s mother, with whom the girl now lives in the music teacher’s former house.
Christie’s short story mesmerizes Joyce. Some days later, she visits the bookstore
to obtain Christie O’Dell’s signature, excited, as she apparently takes Christie’s
story at face value and thus construes it as being autobiographical. She brings a
present for the author that is inspired by the story “Kindertotenlieder,” chocolate
tulips, wanting to find out if the author will recognize her. She does not seem to.
Christie is restrained with Joyce, much as she is with the other readers waiting for
her to sign their book copies:
Christie O’Dell sits there and writes her name as if that is all the writing she
could be responsible for in this world. [… She] has raised her eyes to greet the
next person in line, and Joyce at last has the sense to move on […].

26
 Walking up Lonsdale Avenue, walking uphill, she gradually regains her
composure. This might even turn into a funny story that she would tell some day.
She wouldn’t be surprised. [Munro; 61].
Joyce react highly emotionally to the story “Kindertotenlieder”. At the book
signing, she remarks to Christie: “It means a great deal to me. I brought you a
present” [Munro; 60]. This does not seem as merely the effect of recognition. The
book touched her heart, maybe her love for Jon revived, but, obviously, the
emotions and strong pains of that past phase of her life have been brought back
into her mind.
As for the writer, it seems that the revelation of Christie’s past feelings for
Joyce may be discomfiting for her in front of Joyce, if the story is
autobiographically grounded. From the other side, taking into consideration the
title of Munro’s story, the adult author Christie O’Dell fictionally developed this
story of one-sided infatuation between a schoolchild and her music teacher,
although she based the story on the triangle constellation of lovers she
experienced as a child. With her artistic story, through this narrative, Munro likely
wants readers to consider that despite all the autobiographic inspiration of her
stories, they remain elaborate pieces of fiction and are by no means descriptions
or memories of life. At the same time, “Fiction” is a literary mirror for how
profoundly her own and fictional experiences intertwine in Munro’s work—for
without her specific life experiences, Christie O’Dell would not have written her
story “Kindertotenlieder” the way she did.
In such a way, in the form of “the story within a story”, readers are going
back to the first part of Munro’s story, and, together with Joyce, are trying to
compare the past memories of Joyce with one described in the book by Christie,
that Joyce is reading today. In Part I, it is mentioned that Joyce is teaching Edie’s
daughter and also makes a special effort for the concert, hoping Jon to visit the
concert. Now readers see that this the same situation is observed from different
points of view, and the “reality” is observed in different ways by two personages.
In some way, Part I gives a special importance to the fact that Joyce was
27
extremely devoted to the concert preparation, however, this preparation is clearly
observed in the context of Joyce’s feelings towards Jon. She is interested in a
successful concert in order to impress Jon and wants to motivate her students,
especially for this reason. But, Part I does not mention that Edie’s daughter has
the key role in the school event— as it is later mentioned in Christie’s story. Such
a contradiction of views by two characters with regard to the same situation is an
example of the above-mentioned shift of emphasis that throws the storyline open
to question which events are “true.” The question remains unanswered.
Summarizing, we may say that Joyce discovers how her obsession with Jon
and his new wife affected Edie's little child. The memories she almost forgot,
have been described in the book by a girl, she even did not remember. Obviously,
this story contains all the characteristics of Munro’s art of the short story we have
described in the theoretical chapter: story is divided into past and present, present
events make the main character to go back to the past and to review the situation
from a different point of view, past events influenced the present.

3.2. The impact of the past on the present in “Deep-holes” story

Deep-Holes is a story about a son who grows radically and mysteriously
estranged from his family. The story begins with the journey of Kent’s family, so
events take part in the past: “The picnic was in honor of Alex’s publishing his first
solo article in Zeitschrift f"ur Geomorphology. They were going to Osler Bluff
because it figured largely in the article, and because Sally and the children had
never been there” [Munro; 110].
It is here in the destined place that the board indicating ‘Deep-Holes’ is seen.
It symbolically predicts the emotional as well as the generational gap that was
persistent among the family members.
We can see the deep past of the family which has the big influence on the
present of the main character.

28
 Kent, the protagonist in the story is the son of Alex and Sally . Kent is
always aspired for his father’s attention and love. He made an idealized image of
him. Kent always wanted to be the apple of his father’s eye, so he did everything
to catch his attention. He was very attentive and, “courteous to his father,
bringing him the paper that had been rescued from Savanna and carefully
refolded, pulling out his chain at dinner time” [Munro; 117]. He always praised
his father and called him his hero. On the contrary Alex always showed disregard
for Kent and never paid attention to his emotions and feelings. Even before the
accident happened with Kent Alex believed “Kent was a sneak and a
troublemaker and the possessor of a dirty mind” [Munro; 112]. Kent regarded
him as the savior of his life whereas Alex showed indifference towards him:
“Honor to the man who saved my life,” he might say, or, “Home is the hero.”
He said this rather dramatically though not at all sarcastically. Yet it got on
Alex’s nerves. Kent got on his nerves, had done so even before the deep-hole
drama happened” [Munro; 118].
Even when the accident happened, listening to his cry, Alex and Sally both ran to
the spot. On the way Sally predicted, “If any accident happened it would not be to
her six-year-old who was brave but not inventive, not a show-off. It would be to
Kent” [Munro; 114]. Both Sally and Alex regarded Kent as a troublemaker in the
family. In order to overcome such a situation he fled away from his family. Later
on he wrote a letter to his mother, depicting his state of mind and the reason for
his departure: “It seems so ridiculous to me,” he said, “that a person should be
expected to lock themselves into a suit of clothes. I mean like the suit of clothes of
an engineer or a doctor or a geologist and then the skin grows over it, over the
clothes, I mean, and that person can’t ever get them off. When we are given a
chance to explore the whole world of inner and outer reality and to live in a way
that takes in the spiritual and the physical and the whole range of the beautiful
and the terrible available to mankind, that is pain as well as joy and turmoil. This
way of expressing myself may seem overblown to you, but one thing I have

29
learned to give up is intellectual pridefulness” [Munro; 119]. In this paragraph
we can see the present state of Kent’s mind which was caused by his past life
and especially their relationships in their family. Above lines indicate Kent’s
changed outlook towards his father who always treated him badly. His father was
a geologist and nothing else for him.
In his initial stage Kent wanted to mold his personality just like him, who was
successful, intelligent, and confident. But later on, this idealized image got
shattered and he started detesting him, “one thing I have learned to give up is
intellectual pridefulness” [Munro; 119].
Kent turned into a beggar, lives in a far off land. He changed his name to
‘Jonah’ and detached himself completely from the family. He was living with
poor people in their ghettos. The basic aim of Kent was to assert his individuality
and to take revenge on his family that always wanted to maintain its mannerism
and pridefulness.
When Sally reprimanded Kent to tell about him and not of “those beggars”,
he screamed, “These people are my life” [Munro; 131]. It shows his aggression
towards them. He told Sally about his views of his past life when he was with his
family. Although he was with the family yet he was all alone.
So in this story we can see great impact of Kent’s family on his life
nowadays, especially his father who treated him harsh, heartless and emotionless.
Readers are involved in the past of Kent through the story about his childhood.
And in the end he is absolutely alone: “My life, my life, my progress, what all I
could discover about my stinking self. Purpose of me. My crap. My spirituality.
My intellectuality. There isn’t any inside stuff, Sally. You don’t mind if I call you
Sally? It just comes out easier. There is only outside, what you do, every moment
of your life. Since I realized this I’ve been happy” [Munro; 133].
Kent’s concept of life depicted at the end of the story shows his
transformation into a stable being. He is happy with his new identity and wants to
live his rest of the life in the same manner. He even suggested to Sally that she

30
should also pursue her true self as, “you know you can only save yourself”
[Munro; 134]. This statement made her think of her own identity. Throughout the
life she lived in a frame made by Alex. Kent’s thought made a great mark in her
mind. Now after the death of Alex she re-thinks about her own Self. The
protagonist in the entire narrative is striving to find a substitute for his lost self.
Though he has degraded his condition but for him it is a strategy to cope up the
mental pressures he is been through and to find his real self. So, we can see the
great impact of the past which caused the present of main character.

3.3. The reality and the fiction in the “Free radicals” story
“Free radicals” story is the most mysterious intriguing story of Alice Munro.
At the beginning we get acquaintance with Nita who is grieving the sudden death
of her eighty-one-year old husband Rich: “She did not have time to wonder about
his being late” [Munro; 137]. So death of her husband was very immediate.
In this novel the end of the life is just the beginning of the story. She herself is
twenty years younger and suffers from liver cancer, although this is not clear from
the beginning of the story, where only some clues are given.
When the story starts, Nita is rather lost and numb, avoiding human contact
and thinking about times when Rich was still alive. She then reveals that she was
not Rich’s first wife. He was first married to a woman called Bett, but then Rich
met the younger Nita who “worked in the Registrar’s Office of the university
where he taught Medieval Literature” [Munro; 139]. So the author describes the
past of the Nita and her husband, their life: “This was Rich’s house. He bought it
when he was with his wife Bett. It was to be nothing but a weekend place, closed
up for the winter. Two tiny bedrooms, a lean-to kitchen, half a mile from the
village. But soon he was working on it, learning carpentry, building a wing for
two bedrooms and bathrooms, another wing for his study, turning the original
house into an open-plan living room/dining room/kitchen. Bett became interested-
she had said in the beginning that she could not understand why he had bought

31
such a dump, but practical improvements always engaged her, and she bought
matching carpenter’s aprons. She needed something to become involved in,
having finished and published the cookbook that had occupied her for several
years. They had no children” [Munro; 141].
It is rather short but now she “sits in her usual ample armchair, with piles of
books and unopened magazines around her. She sips cautiously from the mug of
weak herb tea which is now her substitute for coffee. At one time she thought that
she could not live without coffee, but it turned out that it is really the warm large
mug she wants in her hands, that is the aid to thought or whatever it is she
practices through the procession of hours, or of days” [Munro; 141]. So the
abrupt leap from the past to present characterizes this story, too.
Now, Nita is pondering on Rich’s absence, she is thinking of all the rooms
where he used to be but not anymore, and where his presence still lingers through
all of his stuff that reminds her of him: “She thought carefully, every morning
when she first took her seat, of the places where Rich was not. He was not in the
smaller bathroom where his shaving things still were, and the prescription pills
for various troublesome but not serious ailments that he refused to throw out. Nor
was he in the bedroom which she had just tidied and left. Not in the larger
bathroom which he had entered only to take tub baths. Or in the kitchen that had
become mostly his domain in the last year. He was of course not out on the half-
scraped deck, ready to peer jokingly in the window-through which she might, in
earlier days, have pretended to be starting a striptease” [Munro; 140].
She is unable to remove his belongings but she realizes that “one of these
days, she would have to enter the room. She thought of it as invading. She would
have to invade her dead husband’s mind” [Munro; 141].  Also, Nita has been a
devoted reader all her life, but now “she couldn’t stick it for even half a page”
[Munro;142]. She has a preference for fiction, but says that she “hated to hear the
word “escape” used about fiction. She might have argued, not just playfully, that
it was real life that was the escape” [Munro; 142].

32
 One hot day, she decides to open the front door to let a breeze blow through
the house. However, when doing this, she discovers a man standing before the
door who claims that he is supposed to look at her fuse box. Without thinking she
lets him in but then she is seized with a feeling of unease: “she went into the
kitchen, not able to sit down again until he left the house” [Munro; 144]. When he
has left the cellar again, he asks her if she cannot fix him anything to eat. She
prepares him scrambled eggs with herbal tea, after which he shows her a
photograph and tells her a story. On the picture are his father, his mother, and his
mentally and physically disabled sister Madelaine, who is sitting in a wheelchair.
He describes how his sister has made his youth impossible, how much he resents
her, and how his father has promised him that he would inherit the house after
they died. However, one day his father tells him about a deal: he will only inherit
the house if he promises to take care of Madelaine as long as she lives. This
makes him lose his temper and he decides to take revenge. One Sunday he visits
his family at home, he takes a picture of the three of them, he shoots them, and
then he takes another picture, which he also shows Nita: “So lookie here. Before
and after” [Munro; 151]. After the murder he ran away and walked the railway
track until he saw Nita’s house and Rich’s car, and he saw his opportunity.
So we can see the short story of another person, his past, which have
influence on his present and changed his life absolutely and obviously.
At first, Nita was not afraid because she thought nothing worse could happen
to her than the cancer she already has. But after his story, she realizes that
although she might die within a year, she is not prepared to die now. After pouring
him some wine she starts to tell him a story of her own, she says:”I know what
it’s like to get rid of somebody who has injured you” [Munro; 154]. In fact, she
switches her story with that of Bett, saying that she once poisoned her husband’s
lover: “She was the girl my husband was in love with. He was going to leave me
and marry her. He had told me. I’d done everything for him. He and I were
working on this house together. He was everything I had. We hadn’t had any
children, because he didn’t want them. I learned carpentry and I was frightened
33
to get up on ladders, but I did it. He was my whole life. And he was going to kick
me out for this useless whiner who worked in the registrar’s office. Everything
we’d worked for was going to go to her. Was that fair?” [Munro; 155].
She killed a women by giving her a poisoned tart, made from the veins of
rhubarb leaves. By telling this story, by telling fiction, she tries to save her own
life. She wants him to believe that they have told a secret to each other. Thus, in
contrast to what she said earlier, fiction does provide an escape, she didn’t believe
earlier.

Meanwhile, the man has drunk almost all of the wine and he starts acting very
nervously. He asks her for the keys of Rich’s car, and the last words he says to her
are: “You just remember, a word outta you and there’ll be a word outta me”
[Munro; 158]. Later, she is told by a policeman that her car has been stolen and
has been in a bad accident. The driver was wanted for a triple murder and was
killed instantly. The policeman warns her that she should be more careful because
“these days you never know. Never know” [Munro; 150], the last words of the
story. The fact is, we do not know what really happened. Did the man drink too
much wine and was that the reason for his nervousness and the subsequent
accident, or did she poison him? When the man has just left, she sees a book
called A Celebration of Familiar Fruits and Vegetables. Hearty and Elegant
Dishes and Fresh Surprises, written by Bett Underhill. Nita admits that she has
learned a few things from Bett’s cooking, “such as the poisonous aspects of
certain familiar and generally benign plants” [Munro; 159]. Thus, Nita may have
poisoned the man with her herbal tea, which would explain his sudden strange
behaviour: he knocked over the chair he’d been sitting on, he is very clumsy in
taking the car keys, and he has difficulties with starting the car: “he was so jumpy,
he’d do everything wrong” [Munro; 158].

We can notice the fact that we wouldn’t know that Nita’s story to the intruder is a
fiction without her letter to Bett: “Dear Bett, Rich is dead and I have saved my life
34
by becoming you” [Munro; 159]. Nita’s story is so accurate that the reader could
decide Nita really killed her rivel.

So, “Free radicals” story is the example of psychological realism. There are
flashbacks in the past. But the events are developing rapidly rather in the present
than in the past.

3.4. Flashbacks into the past in stories “Too much happiness” and “Some
women”

The story “Too Much Happiness” by Alice Munro is based on the life of Russian
mathematician Sophia Kovalevsky, a historical figure whose life is fictionalized in
this short story. It shows the final weeks of her life, but she covers the rest of her
life in flashbacks.

Alice Munro uses the style of writing making her heroes travel into the past. The
same is with the Sofia, her story is interrupted by flashbacks into her past.

The story “Too Much Happiness” is told through the third person narration. It
starts from the situation which takes place in the last days of Sofia’s life:“On the
first day of January, in the year 1891, a small woman and a large man are walking
in the Old Cemetery, in Genoa. Both of them are around forty years old [Munro;
282].

Simultaneously with flashbacks there are some foresights in the text. We can
come across them on the beginning of the text: "You know that one of us will die,"
she says. "One of us will die this year….Because we have gone walking in a
graveyard on the first day of the New Year" [Munro; 283].

35
Then reader learn about the love relationships between the man, whose name was
Maksim and Sofia: “She met him for the first time in 1888. He had come to
Stockholm to advise on the foundation of a school of social sciences. Their shared
nationality…”[Munro; 284]. So story reveals their past. Their relationships
weren’t easy. “The Bordin Prize was what spoiled them. So Sophia believed. She
herself was taken in by it at first, dazzled by all the chandeliers and champagne
[Munro; 285]. After it Maksim decamped. “He had felt himself ignored” [Munro;
286]. The last his words in the letter disappointed her: “If I loved you I would have
written differently” [Munro; 286]. After all misunderstandings Maksim promised
they would be married in the spring. And then we can notice one more foresight
about their future life with Maksim after their marriage:“Maksim would not
interfere with her real work, which was research, not teaching. He would be glad
she had something to absorb her, though she suspected that he found mathematics
not trivial, but somehow beside the point” [Munro; 289]. She writes to Julia: “It is
to be happiness after all. Happiness after all. Happiness” [Munro; 290].

The next foresight is on the station: “On the station platform a black cat obliquely
crosses their path. She detests cats, particularly black ones. But she says nothing
and contains her shudder. And as if to reward her for this self-control he
announces that he will ride with her as far as Cannes, if she is agreeable” [Munro;
290]. So it indicates the unhappy ending of the story and the reader can understand
it from such predictions in the text.

The main character, Sophia Kovalevsky has a train journey that takes her around
Western Europe, including Paris, Germany, and finally back to Stockholm, her
home. During her journey she can discover that she has a sore throat. It’s the first
mention about her problem with throat: “At least she has time now to discover that
she has a sore throat. If he has caught it she hopes he won’t suspect her” [Munro;
291].

36
Then we can notice her dream about her dead sister Aniuta, Urey and Jaclard:
“She finds herself in a confused dream of Aniuta, but of an Aniuta long before
Urey and Jaclard were on the scene. Aniuta unmarried, golden haired, beautiful,
and bad tempered, back at the family estate of Palibino…” [Munro; 291].

The next her dream we can find to be fiction, but some true facts come to the fore:
“Sophia dozes again, slips into another dream in which she and Aniuta are both
young but not so young as when at Palibino, and they are together in Paris, and
Aniuta’s lover Jaclard-not yet her husband-has supplanted Harold of Hastings
and Fyodor the novelist as her hero, and Jaclard is a genuine hero, though bad
mannered (he glories in his peasant background) and, from the first,
unfaithful. Sophia is left behind in a huge Parisian hospital full of dead soldiers
and bloodied citizens, and one of the dead is her own husband, Vladimir. She runs
away from all these casualties, she is looking for Maksim, who is safe from the
fighting in the Hotel Splendide. Maksim will get her out of this” [Munro; 293]. As
we can understand it was a dream of 1871 but at the beginning it was 1891.

“All this was accomplished” is mentioned in the text about the Sofia’s memories
which were mentioned above [Munro; 295]. So we understand that her dream is
not fiction and some events realy took place in Sofia’s life.
She visits Jaclard and Urey. Jaclard said “he had never got over the winter of
’71, the starvation and the nights in the open”[Munro; 297]. So the second time
1871 year is mentioned. Jaclard talks about his agility and own bravery in that
period of time: “Every time. And every time he told the story, Vladimir’s part-and
the General’s money’s part-grew smaller. No mention of the passport either. It
was Jaclard’s own bravery, his own agility, that counted. But he did seem to be
better disposed to his audience, as he talked. His name was still remembered. His
story still was told” [Munro; 297].
Later in the story we come across the relationships between Jaclard and
Aniuta: “Jaclard had loved her at first, perhaps, as much as he could love
anybody. He noted her love for him. In his naïve or perhaps simply braggartly
37
letter to her father, explaining his decision to marry her, he had written that it
seemed unfair to desert a woman who had so much attachment to himself. He had
never given up other women, not even at the beginning of the liaison when Aniuta
was delirious with her discovery of him. And certainly not throughout the
marriage” [Munro; 299].
In Sofia’s memories we can see Jaclard not fair, stingy, treacherous and
boastful. And Sofia despised him at that moment: “And she too, just now, had
been despising him” [Munro; 299].
Urey was not eager to accompany her to the station platform but he did. At the
station she feels a sore throat again. It is mentioned the second time in the text:
“Sophia was half an hour early for her train. She wanted some tea, and lozenges
for her throat, but she could not face the waiting in line or the speaking French.
No matter how well you can manage when you are in good health, it does not take
much of a droop of spirits or a premonition of sickness to send you back to the
shelter of your nursery language” [Munro; 303].
After it seems to Sofia there is Maksim at the station: “She had been
hallucinating” [Munro; 304]. And after it again her memoirs about Bordin Prize
which spoiled their relationships: “Then they had given her the Bordin Prize, they
had kissed her hand and presented her with speeches and flowers in the most
elegant lavishly lit rooms. But they had closed their doors when it came to giving
her a job” [Munro; 305].
Then “she thinks of the Weierstrass house, where she will sleep tonight. The
professor and his sisters would not hear of a hotel” [Munro;306]. And again her
memories about his home and sisters come to the fore: “Their house is always
comfortable, with its dark rugs and heavy fringed curtains and deep armchairs.
Life there follows a ritual-it is dedicated to study, particularly to the study of
mathematics…Weierstrass had no more idea than his sisters of Sophia’s age or
mission. He told her afterwards that he had thought her some misguided governess
who wanted to use his name, claiming mathematics among her credentials… Great
was his surprise-he told her this too at a later time-to see that every one of the
38
problems had been solved, and sometimes in an entirely original way” [Munro;
306].
“She was a shock to him in many ways. She was so slight and young and
eager. He felt that he must soothe her, hold her carefully, letting her learn how to
manage the fireworks in her own brain” [Munro; 308].
And then author transfer the reader into reality. Sofia is in the second-class
train.
At the midnight she was at Weierstrass house. Then rapidly again memories
when she worked with Weierstrass. He was surprised Sofia has a husband. He was
named Vladimir Kovalevsky and that she was married to him. “Young people-
young women-who wanted to study abroad were compelled to go through with this
deception because no Russian woman who was unmarried could leave the country
without her parents’ consent” [Munro; 313].
Sofia has a talk with Weierstrass.  “It was such a surprise to me that you
would write novels” said Weierstrass [Munro; 320]. We can discover Sofia writes
novels about her life in Palibino “in a glow of love for everything lost, things once
despaired of as well as things once treasured” [Munro; 321].
But there was moment she had failed Weierstrass. She fell in love with
Vladimir. It was good time to establish him after all this time as not just her
husband but her lover. “The smell of the hay fields and the pine woods, the golden
hot summer days, and the long bright evenings of northern Russia intoxicated her”
[Munro; 332]. After this romantic period the real, dismal period started. They
business failed and they went deeper and deeper into debt. Sophia had a baby girl.
They called her Fufu.
Vladimir was offered new job in a company that produced naphtha from a
petroleum spring. The company was owned by the brothers Ragozin. “But this
time Sophia sensed trouble ahead” [Munro; 324]. Vladimir was more and more in
their power. She picked up her correspondence with Weierstrass. She left Fufu
with her old friend Julia and set out for Germany. Sooner Vladimir tied a bag over
his head and inhaled chloroform. “She had not then met Maksim. Or won the
39
Bordin Prize” [Munro; 326]. So the author emphasizes that that was deep past
before she met Maksim.
After these memories the author transfer reader to the reality again. Sofia left
Berlin and Weierstrass. Sofia is in the train. There she gets acquainted with the
doctor. He told her about the smallpox in Copenhgen and Sofia must change her
route and  on her way to Sweden do not go to Copenhagen. Moreover “he placed
in her palm a small tablet, saying, “This will give you a little rest if you find the
journey tedious” [Munro; 331].
Then again her lonely trip and recollection about sore throat: “Sophia’s throat
is so sore now that she is sure she could not speak if she had to” [Munro; 334].
She is thinking of Maksim. Tnen again memoirs about Vladimir and Jaclard:
“Vladimir had not been a coward-look how he had rescued Jaclard-but he did not
have the manly certainties” [Munro; 337].
Sofia’s sore becomes worse.  “She was trying to cough something out of her
chest. The pain, out of her chest. The pain and tightness out of her throat. But she
had to follow the conductor to her compartment, and she was laughing with
triumph in between spells of coughing” [Munro; 339]. She decided to take tablet.
After this we can observe Sofia’ strange behavior: “her heart could go on
expanding, regaining its normal condition, and continuing after that to grow
lighter and fresher and puff things almost humorously out of her way” [Munro;
341]. After it she became worse and she stayed in bed.  “She talked about her
novel, and about the book of recollections of her youth at Palibino. She said she
could do something much better now and started to describe her idea for a new
story. She became confused and laughed because she was not doing this more
clearly” [Munro; 343].
Step by step the author is preparing the reader to the Sofia’s death. And it
happened. She died. “The autopsy would show her lungs completely ravaged by
pneumonia and her heart displaying trouble which went back several years. Her
brain, as everybody expected, was large” [Munro; 344]. So she died of pneumonia

40
like her sister Aniuta. Maksim arrived to speak at the funeral and spoke rather as if
she had been a professor of his acquaintance. He did not mary.
Summarizing the analysis, we may say that the main structure of the story is
unusual due to constant flashbacks about life of the main character. There are
several foresights because of which we can predict the unhappy ending of the
story. There are abrupt leaps in time and place.
"Some Women" is a story about an older, nameless narrator, who is looking
back on an some happening from her past. The narrator recollects an occupation
she had when she was thirteen years old child, during the summer holidays. She
was looking after a man with leukemia, Mr. Crozier, while his wife Sylvia was not
at home. Sylvia was dishonored by people because “she had got an education” and
“she could have stayed home and looked after him now, as promised in the
marriage ceremony, instead of going out to teach” [Munro; 167]. This is how the
story begins. The narrator enters the reader in the world of the Croziers presenting
the members, their occupation, appearance, and some of their abilities, qualities or
moods.
Readers are involved in the past event description just after the first sentence,
which indicates that the story teller is now an older woman, who is recollecting
her past: “I am amazed sometimes to think how old I am. I can remember when
the streets of the town I lived in were sprinkled with water to lay the dust in
summer, and when girls wore waist cinches and crinolines that could stand up by
themselves, and when there was nothing much to be done about things like polio
and leukemia [Munro; 152].
At first, Old Mrs. Crozier, Mr. Crozier’s stepmother, is introduced. She was a
bad-tempered and sulky woman, creating an ominous atmosphere inside the house.
She was walking with a stick, her hair was as black as tar, and always put on a
thick coat. The narrator represents the woman as the stereotypical image of a witch
or the evil stepmother. It seems that Mrs. Crozier cared about nobody, not even her
stepson, whom she experienced as a burden. Later on, it becomes clear that she
resented Sylvia, the wife of Mr. Crozier. With the coming of an attractive young
41
woman called Roxanne, who was a masseuse, Mrs. Crozier seemed to cheer
somewhat up. The narrator reports how she passed by once a week, visiting Mr.
Crozier each time after the massage. Despite the narrator was a child at that time,
she is aware of the specific connection that arose between Roxanne and Mrs.
Crozier, each with the intention of fighting Sylvia. Especially painful is that they
seemed to be trying to take the dying Mr. Crozier away from Sylvia. The narrator
depicts how Roxanne touched him and caressed him which she did not understand
because of the way he looked: I thought this flirtatious prattle insulting. Mr.
Crozier looked terrible. A tall man whose ribs had shown like those of somebody
fresh from a famine when she sponged him, whose head was bald and whose skin
looked as if it had the texture of a plucked chicken’s, his neck corded like an old
man’s. Whenever I had waited on him in any way I had avoided looking at him.
And this was not really because he was sick and ugly. It was because he was
dying. […] I was aware of an atmosphere of death in the house [Munro; 173].
The reason for the narrator to look back upon this episode of her life, is
because even as a thirteen years old child she understood that what was going on
was not right, it exceeded all the limits of normality: a young tempting girl who
wants attention from a dying old man, and the mother of that man who wants to
destroy his family.
The climax of the story happens on the last day of Sylvia’s summer class. The
narrator sees that Mrs. Crozier and Roxanne are discussing some plan because they
know that soon Sylvia will be at home every day: “Seeing it’s the last day we’ve
got before—“, “Last day before she parks her butt here permanently, yeah, I
know. Doesn’t help me breaking out like a spotted hyena”. No chance of having
anything special with her around. You’ll see. You won’t be able to even get to see
him with her around” [Munro; 180]. However, Mr. Crozier must have been aware
of something as well at that day, he expected some tricks from his stepmother.
When the girl-narrator enters his room, he asks her to do him a favour: to take the
key of his room, lock it, hide it without telling his mother or Roxanne where it is,
and returning it only to his wife. The locked door is like a symbol. The story takes
42
place in the house of Crozier family, jumping from the stairs to the kitchen, to the
sunroom, and the mysterious center being the sick Mr. Crozier’s room. The plot of
the narration switches between these rooms, which are reflected upon from a
distant past, but the deep and strong emotions that once lived inside this house stay
in the memory of the child, who is already an old woman.
This story demonstrates A. Munro’s proficiency in describing a child’s
conception of an adult’s life: “I understood pretty well the winning and losing that
had taken place, between Sylvia and Roxanne, but it was strange to think of the
almost obliterated prize, Mr. Crozier” [Munro; 187]. It is weird and strange to
think that at a fairly old age the narrator still remembers this quite banal episode of
her life. She understands that “the carnality at death’s door – or the true love, for
that matter – were things I had to shake off like shivers down my spine” [Munro;
187]. At present, being an old woman, she reflects more upon mortality and the
fact that she was confronted with it at a very young age. The child seemed to have
been more aware than anybody else of the atmosphere of death in the house.
“I am amazed sometimes to think how old I am” and “I grew up, and old” are
the first and the last sentences in the story. Everything between is memory. The
feeling of great surprise of "how old I am", amazement which occurs at the
beginning of the story, is like an invitation to a lifetime of memories. The present
days are represented by two sentences, but these sentences mean so much. Readers
do not know about the life time of the narrator, they are not informed how she
spent her life, but, they are given a chance to guess. “I grew up, and old” may
represent a lot, but, obviously, the trivial case in her childhood was one of the
strongest impression.
So Alice Munro shows past events which are gradually moving to the present.
Some of her story are divided into two parts (“Fiction”) where the first part
describes past life and Joyce’s memories while the second part begins with the
abrupt leap in time and place and shows her present days. One main feature we can
notice of Munro’s stories is “the story within a story”.

43
 Alice Munro is also the author of stories which are the example of
psychological realism (“Free radicals”). But the main feature of her is the style of
writing making her heroes travel in the past.

CONCLUSION

Alice Munro is considered one of the best short story writers in the world
and is responsible for making short-story writing respectable in Canada.
Throughout the years, Munro’s style and themes have not changed a lot, although
in her later work, she tends to focus more on the constraints of old age and
loneliness, and the way her narrators tell a story based on memories from their
youth. In the work presented we were to analyze the author’s style of narration, her
style of verbalization of reality and memories in short stories. As the basis for the
analysis, the collection “Too Much Happiness” has been selected.
In the Introduction we pointed out the aim of this research, tasks of the
work, scientific novelty, theoretical value, practical value and other peculiarities
and features of the research work.
44
 In the Chapter I investigated approaches to the analysis of A. Munro’s
narration style. As we distinguished Munro uses particular style of writing, making
her heroes to travel into the past to explain their present. Moreover her stories have
the power of many novels.
In the Chapter II we presented practical analysis of verbalization of the past
in the collection “Too much happiness”. In the Munro’s stories there are not neat
endings, no straightforward progressions, no character arcs. We distinguished some
features of Munro’s stories. They are: ordinary happenings in an everyday world
supported by a fine sense of detail; there is one event that took place in the hero’s
life and it usually starts from some unexpected point; the stories end in such
unexpected point as they started; the main structure is unusual due tot he constant
flashbacks of characters; the effect of memories arriving as jolts tot he present;
jumping from one past or present event to another is the main feature of Munro’s
stories, too.
Chapter III contains the analysis of verbalization of the present due to the
impact of past in the same collection. The stories also are characterized by abrupt
leap in time and present. Moreover, one more feature is “the story within a story”
where “reality” is observed in different ways by two personages (“Fiction”).
On the basis of our analysis, the following conclusions are made. Munro’s
stories from the collection under the analysis are written in the way that they can
tell a whole lifetime story in only a few pages, constantly switching between past
and present, inside and outside.
The majority of the characters in "Too Much Happiness" have reached
middle age or even old age, and A. Munro describes their life stories using
flashbacks or dreams. Their life, full of dullness and prejudice, was once disrupted
by a mysterious, sometimes cruel event at a young age, which affects their further
life. It is not exactly the event itself which Munro emphasizes, but the effects it has
on her protagonists since in almost all of the stories, the event is revealed only at
the end of the story.

45
 In the stories we have analyzed, the bigger part of events take place in the
past, but, each story shows some consequences at present. A. Munro depicts her
stories by putting readers into the past, then going even further, and suddenly
moving back. The narration is interesting and carefully elaborated in a way to
interest the reader, and to impress him with the climax.

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22. Hunter Adrian. The Cambridge Introduction to the Short Story in English.
New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
23. Keegan Alex. Alice Munro: The Short Answer [Electronic
recsource]// Access Mode: http://www.eclectica.org/v2n5/keegan_munro.html
24. Mallinson Jean. John Robert Colombo: Documentary Poet as Visionary.
Essays on Canadian Writing: 1976.
25. Mayberry, K.J. Every Last Thing… Everlasting: Alice Munro and the Limits
of Narrative [Text] / K.J. Mayberry. – Bloom’s Modern Critical Views. – Infobase
Publishing, 2009. – p. 29-30.
26. Munro Alice. Too Much Happiness. London: Chatto and Windus, 2009.
27. Pfaus, B. (1984). Alice Munro. Ottawa, Ontario: The Golden Dog Press.
28. Rasporich Beverly Jean. Dance of the sexes: art and gender in the fiction of
Alice Munro. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 1990.
29. Redekop Magdalene. Mothers and Other Clowns: The Stories of Alice
Munro. London: Routledge, 1992.
30. Ross Catherine Sheldrick. Alice Munro: A Double Life. Toronto: ECW
Press, 1992.
31. Stich K. Peter. Reflections: Autobiography and Canadian Literature,
University of Ottawa Press, 1988 

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32. Thacker Robert. Reading Alice Munro, 1973 –2013. Canada: University of
Calgary Press.
33. Thacker Robert. Review of Some other reality: Alice Munro's Something
I've been Meaning to Tell You. MacKendrick: Journal of Canadian Studies, 1998.
Vancoppernolle Elisa. Haunted Families: Gothic Realism in Alice Munro’s Too
Much Happiness [Electronic recsource]// Access Mode: https://lib.ugent.be/fulltxt/
34. The Sense of an Ending – the mode of excess:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/18/books/review/dear-life-stories-by-alice-
munro. html?pagewanted=all

ANNOTATION

to the bachelor diploma work of Tetiana Movchan on the topic:

“Verbalization of reality and memories in the short stories of Alice Munro”

The thesis is devoted to the research and analysis of A. Munro’s storytelling

style on the basis of the collection “Too much happiness”. Alice Munro is one of
the brightest representatives of contemporary female literature author. In the work
one has done the research of nine short stories of Alice Munro, analyzed the
49
storytelling style of the author, the style of verbalization of past and present on the
basis of the collection “Too much happiness” by Alice Munro. A comparative
analysis of texts was conducted.
In the process of work, conclusions were drawn about the common and
distinctive features in the novels (topics, relevance, problems, narrative structures)
and features of storytelling style of the author.
The results of the work were presented at the conference.
The work contains: 3 sections, 9 subdivisions, 48 pages, 34 sources.
Key words: verbalization, reality, flashbacks, fiction, narrator, past, present.

АНОТАЦІЯ
до бакалаврської дипломної роботи Мовчан Тетяни Олександрівни
на тему: «Вербалізація реальності та спогадів у коротких оповіданнях
Еліс Манро»

Дипломна робота присвячена дослідженню та аналізу стилю Еліс Манро

у жанрі коротких оповідань на прикладі збірки «Забагато щастя». Еліс Манро
одна з найяскравіших представників сучасної жіночої літератури і майстриня
короткої прози. У роботі проведено дослідження дев’яти коротких оповідань
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Еліс Манро, досліджено стиль поданих оповідань, проаналізовано
вербалізацію спогадів у минулому та теперішньому на прикладі збірки
«Забагато щастя». Проведено компаративний аналіз текстів.
В процеcі роботи було зроблено висновки щодо спільних та відмінних
рис в оповіданнях (тематика, актуальність, проблематика, наративні
структури) та особливості стилю викладу змісту в коротких оповіданнях.
Результати роботи були представлені на конференції.
Робота містить: 3 розділи, 9 підрозділів, 48 сторінки , 34 джерел.
Ключові слова: вербалізація, реальність, спогади, художня література,
оповідач, минуле, теперішнє.

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