ABSTRACT

Alice Munro is best known as a short-story writer: since 1977 she has been a regular contributor to the New Yorker. Along with fellow Canadian Mavis Gallant, Munro has pioneered the genre of the novel-length short-story sequence. Besides several traditional collections, Munro has published three short-story sequences, Lives of Girls and Women (1971), Who Do You Think You Are? (1978; published in the United States as The Beggar Maid: Stories of Flo and Rose, 1979), and, most recently, Open Secrets (1994). These sequences, which focus on a single developing character, participate in a searching investigation of what novelistic forms like the retrospective first-person narration, the Bildungsroman, or the historical novel can and cannot encompass. Munro's linked short stories fracture the singular plotline that in a novel might tie things together. In its place are freestanding yet overlapping stories that may seem only a few steps removed from "the scraps of papers and torn envelopes ... records of the weather, bits of information about the garden, things he had been moved to write down" that one character finds in her father's work shed after his death. The short-story sequence probes the pretensions of narrative forms that discover an explanatory design or an historical continuity in experience. Experience in Munro's fiction is both mundane and unfathomable. Without warning or explanation, ordinary inhabitants of small-town Ontario go missing or fall in love, or the relationship between actions and rewards and punishments simply goes out of kilter. In such contexts, the efforts of narrators to provide explanations or locate origins or ends seem simultaneously overweening, pointless, and redemptive.