Analysis of the Main Character Nita

Munro’s Free Radicals centers around the character of Nita, who, at the beginning
of the story, was diagnosed with cancer and had trouble with alcoholism. The around-
sixty-year-old Nita is married to Rich, who has been married before to a woman named
Bett but, at the same time, had a relationship with Nita. Rich finally divorced his wife and
married his mistress. Out of the blue, Rich had an accident and died immediately, and he
was buried through a very simple service and funeral as he and Nita had agreed before.
The sudden shock has completely shut her down mentally, but the only thing that Nita is
afraid of right now is the look of grieve and pity from others. “At first, they had crowded
in on Nita. They had not actually spoken of the grieving process, but she had been afraid
that at any moment they might start” (Munro, p.2). After that, we had a flashback to tell the
background story which tells how Rich met Nita when he was a professor of Medieval art
in the university. After they have been discovered by the wife Bett, they settled down
together. After a while, Nita realized that she has been deceiving herself by playing the
role of the innocent young girl which is not her true nature.

“Later, when she and Rich had settled down, she felt somewhat embarrassed to
think how readily she had played the younger woman, the happy home-wrecker,
the lissome, laughing, tripping ingénue. She was really a rather serious, physically
awkward, self-conscious woman, who could recite not just the kings but the
queens of England.” (Munro, p.5)

After the death of Rich, Nita felt great loneliness, and she always checked her husband in
every corner of their house because she was the one who was supposed to die earlier.
While Rich was still alive, Nita has been an eager reader, and Rich liked this a lot about
her because “she could sit and read and let him alone”; however, after Rich’s death, she
has lost her passion for reading and she is now “couldn’t stick to it for even half a page.”
A sudden accident will make Nita changes her view of the world around her. On day, she
receives a man in her house to fix the fuse box. He insists that he wants to have a light
meal because he pretended to be diabetic. After finishing his meal, he started narrating a
story, but Nita didn’t want to listen because “She was also sure that the less she knew the
better it would be for her” (Munro, p.10). He told the story of how he killed his parents and
his wheel-chaired sister just to avoid taking care of her because he detested her. “There
was bad blood between her and me since ever I remember” (Munro, p.12). After that, Nita
tried to fabricate her own story just to show this mad man that she knows what he has
been through and to avoid being killed. In her fabricated story, she takes the role of Bett
and tells him how she poisoned her husband mistress Nita. “I know what it’s like. I know
what it’s like to get rid of somebody who has injured you” (Munro, p.11). She told him. At
this particular moment, she saw life from Bett’s perspective and realized the immense
injury she had done to her. She described the poisoning of herself in her fabricated story
as “necessary” because “I kept my marriage.” After she finishes her story, the man stole
the key of her late husband’s car and drove away. Nita now is utterly shocked. She has
been so near to being killed by this man but was saved. She wished that she could write a
letter to Bett saying “Dear Bett, Rich is dead and I have saved my life by becoming you”
(Munro, p.16). But she dropped the idea knowing that Bett doesn’t care about them

anymore. After that, a policeman came to tell her that her car was stolen and the thief has
been killed in a car incident. At the end of the story, Nita embraced and admitted her
countless injuries she has done to Bett after denying them and being indifferent to them
for a long time.

Main Themes: Psychological Perception, the Five Stages of Grieve, and Lonely
Women

Although it is a short story with only one main character and one main line of
action, Munro’s Free Radicals contains various themes. The story invites a psychological
reading for it merges the outer reality with the inner reality, and the line between the real
and the imaginary is to some degree blurred. The kitchen scene where Nita had a
conversation with the man can be interpreted psychologically as a hint to her inner world.
Nita fells betrayed by her late husband Rich who, as she thinks, abandoned his
responsibilities toward her just like the man who killed his entire family for fear of taking
responsibility. “It’s only a deal if you sign the papers that you will take care of your sister
as long as she lives. It’s only your home if it’s her home, too,’ (Munro, p.13) said the father
to the mad man. The story can also be seen as representing the five stages of grieve as
proposed by psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. Rose suggests that “we go through five
distinct stages of grief after the loss of a loved one: Denial, anger, bargaining, depression,
and finally acceptance” (Newman, p.3). Nita, throughout the story, goes through these
five stage until she reaches acceptance at the end. The story also shed light on the
struggle of lonely women and the view of the society toward them. Nita is depicted as a
woman who tries to do the duty of her late husband, but she struggles a lot and fails in
this. She can never do the work of a man. She also depends completely on her husband
not only physically but also mentally and spiritually. The view of the society toward
lonely women is seen evident in the last line of the story where the policeman lectures
Nita on the dangers surrounding lonely women. “There followed a kindly stern lecture.
Leaving keys in the car. Woman living alone. These days you never know” (Munro, p.16).
Had Nita been a man, the policeman will never see her as a weak and vulnerable person.

Alice Munro and Feminism

Alice Ann Munro is a Canadian short story writer who won the Nobel Prize in
Literature in 2013. She is regarded as a leading feminist writer of the current age. Her
revolutionary ideas and emotional depiction of women’s sufferings and problems have
evoked a collective sympathy toward women’s rights. Feminism is a “doctrine or
movement that advocates equal rights for women” (Collins Dictionary). In her various
stories, the narrative voice is almost always a female one. These voices reflect girls’ and
women’s problems in all ages and stages as Kodhmuri venat satish observed that:

“Her fiction has to be examined from the feminist view point. The stories of Alice
Munro are “well made”. They are journey men’s work. They deliver the feminist
 ideology of Munro. The subject matter of her stories is the status of women in the
patriarchal society” (Satish, p.59).

And indeed it is. In Free Radicals, the omniscient third person narrator moves freely in
time to depict the struggle, development, and psychological maturation of the protagonist
Nita. Munro mixed the past with the present, the real with the imaginary to present a
detailed picture of her main character from different angles. Satish also noted that Munro
“points out the impact of class and generation gaps and the effect of relationships on
woman.” Nita struggles at the beginning of the story from the generation gap between her
and those around her, and the result is miscommunication and isolation. When Nita talks
with her younger friends, “Her younger friends found this sort of talk unseemly and
evasive.” She could only talk her heart out with her two “ (Munro, p.3). She should have
spoken like this only to her close and fellow bad-mouthing friends, Virgie and Carol,
women around her own age, which was sixty-two” (Munro, p.3). The women in Munro’s
fiction appear:

“to take the measure of their own unhappiness from the depth and distance of male
isolation. The women as an image of freedom from the world of domesticity and
repel them as evidence of the seemingly unbreachable psychic and affective
distance between men and women (Jansen 311).

Nita has experienced a tremendous shock after the loss of her husband Rich. She sees his
death as a betrayal and abandonment of his responsibilities toward her. In addition, Bett,
Rich’s former wife, has completely vanished out of the framework of the story when she
was abandoned by her husband, as if the male partner is the source of the two extremes,
happiness and misery. Moreover, Munro’s stories can be regarded as autobiographical
and genuine. She has been influenced by her childhood in the suburb of Canada and the
loss of her infant child. Satish and M.Prabhakar viewed Munro’s stories as being
influenced by
 “Munro’s childhood experiences in the small town have taught her to expose the
predicament of women in the form of stories. Her stories voice woman’s feelings
towards society from feminist perspective” (Satish, p.60).

Free Radical is a story of female struggle, love and betrayal, reality and illusion, and the
need of freedom and independence. It is a truly feminist portrayal of reality and one of
Munro’s masterpiece.

Works Cited

Jansen, Reamy. “Being Lonely-Dimensions of the Short Story Cross Currents”

.Contemporary literary

Criticism 39.4 (Winter 1989-90):399-401,419.

Munro, Alice. “Free Radicals.” The New Yorker,

www.newyorker.com/magazine/2008/02/11/free-radicals-2.

Newman L. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross. BMJ. 2004;329(7466):627.

Satish , K.Venkat. “Alice Munro's Stories and Feminisim.” Reaserch Gate, vol. 4, no. 1,
3 June 2011, pp. 57–61.