Alice Munro

The main conflict in “An Ounce of Cure” is an internal one, a conflict between the unnamed narrator and herself. This conflict is the main driver of the action and forms the basis of much of what...

Alice Munro portrays two sisters who struggle with the death of their mother in “The Peace of Utrecht.” The setting is Jubilee, in Canada. The point of view is first person with Helen, one of the...

The first love is hard to get over especially when the love is not reciprocated. Alice Munro’s “An Ounce of Cure” describes a teenager’s reaction to being dumped by her first boyfriend. How the...

One could argue that the gap between Greta's identity as a poet—or "poetess" as her husband Peter's family insists on calling her—and as a wife and mother isn't really troubling at all. It only...

"The Found Boat" is about a group of schoolchildren—two girls and three boys—who find a dilapidated boat in a river near their homes. The boys start out by ridiculing the girls and making fun of...

In “Red Dress” by Alice Munro and “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan, both mothers live vicariously through their daughters and want them to be happy; one wants an ordinary life for her daughter, and the other...

In Alice Munro’s “The Shining Houses,” Mary is indeed insightful, compassionate, and fair. Let’s look through the story to find examples of these characteristics to get you started on this...

One character that you could probably build a thesis around is Verna. You could argue something like: In Alice Munro’s short story “Child’s Play,” Verna represents the Other. The Other is a term...

What happens when a girl gets dumped? This is the problem faced by the main character in Alice Munro’s “An Ounce of Cure.” The narration is first person point of view with the protagonist, an...

Since publishing her first short story in 1950, "The Dimensions of a Shadow," Canadian writer Alice Munro, now ninety, has published 163 short stories. The short story is her primary genre, and it...

“The Peace of Utrecht” by Alice Munro portrays two sisters who took different paths in facing their individual futures. The older sister stayed at home and took care of their mentally ill mother;...

You haven't told us which short story this quote comes from, so I will have to respond as best I can just from the quote. However, please remember that whenever you are trying to establish the...

The town and the era in which "An Ounce of Cure" occurs contributes to the narrator's grievances in that she's never really able to forget two youthful mistakes, which were all centered around a...

I'll stick with the short story "Boys and Girls" by Alice Munro. The story is narrated from the perspective of an 11 year old girl. She lives on a ranch that breeds and raises foxes. The narrator...

The ambiguity of Herb's sexuality makes him an enigma to the narrator in the short story "The Turkey Season." While she is working and learning at the Turkey Barn, she becomes enamored with Herb,...

At the end of To Reach Japan, the sentence portraying one of the girls' "pulling away" actually leaves its grammatical subject ambiguous. That is, it isn't explicit whether Katy or Greta is the one...

In a PhD interview, examiners are normally concerned with the issue of whether you are prepared for postgraduate level work on your specific subject. In particular, you want to give the impression...

I think it's a wonderful idea for a thesis. It is true that Bakhtin saw the novel (particularly psychologically complex texts like Dostoevsky's novels) as the best examples of what he called...