that Mrs. Jordan is not actually trying to get better. Instead, Mrs. Jordan looks at the tree outside the porch so she can imagine she is ‘‘at home.’’ Her longing for the farm, however, resides solely in her desire to return to a more genteel lifestyle. She turns down her husband’s suggestion that she get fresh air by accompanying him on his route because ‘‘[t]hat is not [her] . . . idea of a drive in the country.’’ On the day the story takes place, Mr. Jordan takes the children with him to give his wife a rest. The narrator acutely but tactfully observes, ‘‘What is there about us that people need to be given a rest from? Never mind.’’ Her dismissal of her own question shows an astute understanding that her mother’s malaise stems from her insistence on lamenting the past.

Ben Jordan shows a marked contrast to his wife. He has rebounded from the loss of his fox farm to the best of his ability and found a job at a time when hundreds of thousands of people were out of work. As he tells Nora, ‘‘‘It keeps the wolf from the door, keeps him as far away as the back fence.’’’ Unlike Mrs. Jordan, Nora appreciates the importance of even a less-than-desirable job: ‘‘‘Well, I guess you count yourself lucky to have the work.’’’ Ben also puts forth deliberate effort to make his job an amusing caper, to bolster both his own spirits and those of his family. For instance, he makes up songs about his travels, which he shares with his family; but Mrs. Jordan responds with, ‘‘[n]ot a very funny song.’’ (Though, when her husband exaggerates stories about his day’s visits, she ‘‘would laugh finally, unwillingly.’’) The song Ben makes up about himself, which he calls ‘‘The Walker Brothers Cowboy,’’ demonstrates the new image he must now create of himself: like a cowboy, Ben is a wanderer in the sparsely inhabited backcountry, a balladeer off on an adventure.

On the afternoon of the story, Ben does take his children on an adventure when he brings them to Nora’s farmhouse. The narrator compares Nora to the women she knows, particularly her mother. When the narrator first sees Nora, she is dressed in a dirty smock and running shoes, resembling nothing less than the townswomen Mrs. Jordan looks down upon. When Nora comes downstairs after changing her clothes, the narrator thinks that Nora’s dress ‘‘is flowered more lavishly than anything my mother owns.’’ The other physical descriptions the narrator applies to Nora are far from attractive. She notes her heavy arms, skin that is ‘‘covered with little dark freckles like measles,’’ and coarse, black hair.

Certainly, as the narrator indicates, both Nora and Mrs. Jordan feel bitterness about the turn their lives have taken—Mrs. Jordan because she has joined the ranks of the town poor, and Nora because she is unmarried and lives a life of relative isolation. But the key difference between the two women is what they choose to make of the moments in life that can offer them pleasure. When Ben tells his stories and sings his songs, Nora laughs as hard as the children do. She even laughs so much that Ben ‘‘has to stop and wait for her to get over laughing so he can go on, because she makes him laugh too.’’ Unlike Mrs. Jordan, who is so caught up in her own needs that she does not see those of her family, Nora offers others the chance to experience joy. She plays a gramophone record for the narrator’s brother. She teaches the narrator to dance, whirling her around until the girl feels ‘‘proud.’’ At this point, Nora’s unrefined physical characteristics no longer bother the narrator. She is close enough to notice the ‘‘black hairs at the corners of [Nora’s] mouth,’’ but she describes them as soft, not coarse. She sees that Nora is sweating under her arms and above her upper lip, but she is not disgusted by this. Instead, dancing with Nora, the narrator feels enveloped in the woman’s ‘‘strange gaiety’’—unlike her mother, Nora can make the girl feel protected and alive.

Despite the disparity between the three adult characters, they do all have a certain regard for the past. In Mrs. Jordan’s case, the past is all-consuming and her longing for it prevents her from deriving any pleasure in the present. It also threatens the harmony of her family. Ben, too, is drawn to the past, as evidenced by his visit to Nora’s home. He also enjoys the freedom that comes with being in her company, the whisky drinking, the unsuppressed enjoyment in his sales stories. However, he recognizes that he cannot mix his past with his present; thus, he refuses Nora’s suggestion to dance and says they must return home. He still hopes to maintain an enduring connection to Nora, inviting her to drop in on the Jordan household. Nora, however, will not take him up on this invitation. As the narrator reports, although Ben tells Nora how to find the house, ‘‘Nora does not repeat these directions.’’ Throughout the afternoon, Nora has shown both anger and enjoyment in seeing Ben again, but ultimately has no choice but to recognize that it is just an afternoon’s diversion, however sincere, and that Ben will take his children and she will be alone again. As she tells Ben, ‘‘‘I can drink alone but I can’t dance alone.’’’

The narrator takes in these different perceptions of the past, and absorbs them into her own sense of the world around her. On the ride home, she realizes without her father saying anything, ‘‘that there are things not to be mentioned’’ to her mother. The course of the afternoon has added to a young girl’s developing maturity. At once, she shares an understanding with her father but also recognizes that he—and the other adults—are essentially unknowable. ‘‘I feel my father’s life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon,’’ are the words the narrator closes with,

darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary, and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine.

As E. D. Blodgett writes in Alice Munro, the narrator ‘‘becomes gradually aware that the past is a psychological domain that makes of those who appear so intimately ours something other and mysterious.’’ By the end of the story, the narrator stands on the threshold of the adult world.

Source: Rena Korb, Critical Essay on ‘‘Walker Brothers Cowboy,’’ in Short Stories for Students, The Gale Group, 2001. Korb has a master’s degree in English literature and creative writing and has written for a wide variety of educational publishers.

Just as the emotional core of the group of stories discussed in chapter 2 is defined by the common element of uncontrollability shared by the key metaphors in these stories—the surfacing subterranean stream, the bursting boil, the earth-splitting quake, the erupting volcano, and the sudden irruptive violence of often fatal accidents—a second set of somewhat similar metaphors defines the emotional core of earlier stories. These metaphors associate sexuality and death with each other as a terrifying power loose in the world. This association occurs through the metaphorical definition of this power as fire or electricity. . .

In ‘‘Walker Brothers Cowboy,’’ ‘‘Images,’’ ‘‘Boys and Girls,’’ and the novel, Del, first as a little girl and then as an adolescent, is always the firstperson narrator. The little girl in the first two of these stories, although she remains nameless, is identified as Ben Jordan’s daughter, so the reader sees her as younger versions of the same Del Jordan who reappears as a fourth-grader at the beginning of the novel and graduates from high school at its end . . .

The developing narrator in these stories and in the novel is concerned with coming to know the world, especially the same dark world of sexuality and death that the first-person narrator confronts in ‘‘At the Other Place.’’ In ‘‘Walker Brothers Cowboy,’’ the little girl is getting ready to go to school; in ‘‘Images’’ she is so young that she can still remember trying to fall asleep in a crib. In both of these stories, she is a first-person narrator who functions both as the protagonist in the center of what she sees as her story and as the older narrator remembering her younger self.

But in these two stories, even more than in ‘‘At the Other Place,’’ the remembered child’s innocence and ignorance push her to the periphery of the story’s main action, which is what the adults are doing. This effect is less marked in ‘‘Walker Brothers Cowboy’’ than in ‘‘Images.’’ The child in the first story is proud of being older and therefore more observant than her little brother, who ‘‘does not notice enough.’’ But in ‘‘Images’’ she herself does not grasp the central fact of the story, that her mysteriously altered mother is about to give birth. In spite of this difference, however, the two stories have a basic similarity in their manipulation of point of view: they use not only a dual point of view but what is sometimes actually a triple one to emphasize the child’s peripheral position, her innocent eye’s incomprehension of the most powerful facts of life.

In both stories these are the sexual facts; in the second story, the ‘‘images’’ also include images of death, as in ‘‘At the Other Place,’’ and these images become metaphors of terrifying electric power. In ‘‘Walker Brothers Cowboy’’ the main episode is Ben Jordan’s visit to the Cronin farm, but in the introductory section his explanation of how the Great Lakes were formed leaves his little daughter appalled by ‘‘[t]he tiny share we have of time.’’ Although muted and indirect, this initial allusion to death is the somber background against which she then describes the emotional reactions of Nora Cronin to the totally unexpected visit of her former suitor, Ben Jordan, a Walker Brothers salesman. The narrator reports the outward details of how Nora speaks and acts but shows no real comprehension of the complicated reasons for Nora’s behavior. Although the child intuitively senses that the visit to the farm should be kept secret from her stayat- home mother, at the end she identifies as ‘‘things not to be mentioned’’ only that her father, supposedly a teetotaler, drank whiskey and that Nora tried to teach her to dance. In spite of the explicit thematic summary at the end of the story, the child’s sense of darkness and mystery in her father’s life does not include any emotional comprehension of Nora’s life. Naturally the child concentrates on her sudden sense of strangeness in a very familiar figure, her own kind father, but the reader is made to see more.

Through this additional, implied dimension to the situation, Munro emphasizes the peripheral position of the child reporting the action. The child narrator reports that Nora speaks ‘‘harshly’’ and as if her stomach ‘‘hurt’’ when Jordan and his two children arrive at the Cronin farm. But the narrator does not attempt to explain why Nora, after this obviously painful initial reaction, is suddenly galvanized into action. She changes into a sheer, flowered dress, applies cologne, drinks whiskey, puts a record on the gramophone, and begins to laugh and dance with ‘‘strange gaiety.’’ However, when the father refuses Nora’s breathlessly hopeful invitation to dance with her—a temptation to which he must not yield, in spite of, or perhaps because of, the implied sexual tension between him and his sickly, over-refined wife—Nora, still sweaty with exertion and excitement, takes the record off. By the time her visitors leave, her almost hysterical excitement has turned into bitterness. The reader sees the complicated reasons for Nora’s painfully confused arousal, but the young narrator in the time frame of the story does not state them. She senses that Nora’s CatholiW cism, indicated by a picture of the Virgin in the Cronin house, was the obstacle preventing her father’s marriage to Nora. But she is too young to grasp Nora’s feelings of betrayal, physical loneliness, and loss, as she struggles to support herself and her blind mother on a farm during the Depression. As in ‘‘At the Other Place,’’ the adults’ sexual emotions are left unstated, but what the child at the edge of the action cannot grasp Munro lets her readers recognize and define for themselves.

Source: Ildiko de Papp Carrington, ‘‘The Uncontrollable: A Power Loose in the World,’’ in Controlling the Uncontrollable: The Fiction of Alice Munro, Northern Illinois University Press, 2001, pp. 71–73.

There is a challenging ambivalence in Alice Munro’s stories and her open-ended episodic novels, a glimmering fluctuation between actuality and fictional reality, or, if one prefers it, a tension between autobiography and invention which she manipulates so superbly that both elements are used to the full and in the process enrich each other . . .

Just as magic realist painters create a kind of super-reality by the impeccable presentation of details in a preternaturally clear light, and in this way isolate their images from actuality, so Munro has combined documentary methods with a style as clear as the tempera medium in painting. In this essay I propose to discuss the methods in the hope of illuminating the ends.

Alice Munro has been rightly reluctant to offer theoretical explanations of her methods, for she is quite obviously an anti-dogmatic, the kind of writer who works with feeling ahead of theory. But even on the theoretical level she is shrewd in defining the perimeters of her approach, perhaps negatively rather than positively. She once, for example, in an essay written for John Metcalf’s The Narrative Voice, entitled ‘‘The Colonel’s Hash Resettled,’’ cautioned against attempts to read symbolism excessively into her stories. And she was right, for essentially her stories are what they say, offering their meaning with often stark directness, and gaining their effect from their intense visuality, so that they are always vivid in the mind’s eye, which is another way of saying that she has learnt the power of the image and how to turn it to the purposes of prose.

Her visuality is not merely a matter of rendering the surface, the realm of mere perception, for she has understood that one of the great advantages of any effective imagist technique is that the image not merely presents itself. It reverberates with the power of its associations, and even with the intensity of its own isolated and illuminated presence. Munro herself conveyed something of this when John Metcalf, remarking on the fact that she seemed to ‘‘glory in the surfaces and textures,’’ asked whether she did not in fact feel ‘‘‘surfaces’ not to be surfaces,’’ and she answered that there was ‘‘a kind of magic . . . about everything,’’ ‘‘a feeling about the intensity of what is there.’’

When Alice Munro first began to write, her work tended to be undervalued, except by a few exceptionally percipient readers like Robert Weaver, because her tales of Ontario small-town life were taken to be those of a rather conventional realist with a certain flair for local colour. And realism at that time, following its decline in the visual arts, was going into a somewhat lesser eclipse in literature. Canada was becoming aware of modernism, and this meant that for a time at least writers were concerned with thematic and symbolic fiction rather than with anything that savoured of the mimetic.

Alice Munro has always been one of those fortunate and self-sufficient writers who never really become involved in movements or in literary fashions. From her start she had her own view of life, largely as she had lived it herself, and her aim was to express it in a fiction distinguished by craftsmanship and clear vision rather than by selfconscious artifice. It was a curiously paradoxical method of self-cultivation and self-effacement that she followed, for she has always written best when her stories or the episodes in her novels were close to her own experience in a world she knew, yet at the same time she cultivated a prose from which authorly mannerisms were so absent that it seemed as though the stories had their own voices. In the process Alice Munro became, next to Marian Engel, perhaps Canada’s best prose stylist.

But linked to the pellucid clarity of that voice, or voices, there was always the intense vision—and in this context I mean vision as a power of visualizing. The comparison with magic realist painters that I made early in this essay is not merely an analogical one, for Munro is always deeply concerned with describing, with establishing scenes and people clearly in the mind’s eye, and as in real life, so in her stories, we establish our conception of the character of people first by recognizing what they look like and how they speak, and then, such familiarity established, proceeding inward to minds and feelings. The photographic element in her presentation of scenes and characters as visualizable images is an essential factor in her writing . . .

More important, perhaps, is the general resemblance between the kind of realism that Alice Munro developed during the 1950s and that of the early days of modernism, the kind of realism one finds not only in the early Joyce and—more lyrically expressed—in the early Lawrence, but also in their continental European contemporaries like Thomas Mann and Italo Svevo. There is the same tendency towards the Bildungsroman, whether manifest in a novel or disguised in a cluster of related stories; the sense of a society observed with oppressive closeness from within by someone who wants to escape; the concern for the appalling insecurities created by what was then called social climbing, and now is called upward mobility; the agonized awareness of the perils of moving through the transitions of life, from childhood to adolescence, from adulthood to age.

While Alice Munro’s approach has a great deal in common with this European realism of the early part of the century that trembled on the edge of modernism, without herself going forward—as some of the modernists like Joyce and Wyndham Lewis did—from realism to the extremes of formalism, it has little in common with the kind of prairie writing that represented realism for Canadians during the decades between the great wars. Writers such as Robert Stead, Martha Ostenso and Frederick Philip Grove were concerned with the pioneer farmers and their struggle with the frontier lands of the great plains. Alice Munro was dealing with a society that had long passed out of the pioneer stage, and represented a decaying established culture rather than a frontier one. The problem of those who inhabited it was not, as it had been with Grove’s characters, to conquer the wilderness without being destroyed in the process, but to escape before one had been dragged down into the mental stagnation and physical decay of the marginal farmlands of Ontario.

Alice Munro herself grew up in this background, and much of the content of her stories and novels, if it is not strictly autobiographical, does echo the experiences of her youth. Like Del Jordan in Lives of Girls and Women, she was brought up on a farm where her father bred silver foxes without ever prospering greatly; her mother, like Del’s, was a bright, frustrated woman, whose iconoclastic cast of mind contradicted her social ambition, and who died of Parkinson’s disease. Again like more than one of her heroines, Munro married and moved west to British Columbia, which gave her another terrain for her stories; also like them, she stepped out of a distintegrating marriage and returned to Ontario. In other words, she wrote of what she knew best, and while each of her stories lives within its own complete world and is not a mere mirroring of the writer’s life, it is inevitable that the fictions she drew out of the intensely remembered country of her childhood should be more convincing than those she conceived in British Columbia, where she was never completely at home . . .

The three stories of childhood, ‘‘Walker Brothers Cowboy,’’ ‘‘Image’’ and ‘‘Boys and Girls,’’ are perhaps the most important of this group, both for their vivid evocation of the decaying rural life a century after the pioneers of Upper Canada, and for their delineation of the relationships between parents and children in hard times.

‘‘Walker Brothers Cowboy,’’ the opening story of the book, takes us to a time when the silver fox farm has failed and Ben Jordan has taken up peddling the patent medicines, spices and food flavourings distributed by Walker Brothers. The story, told by his daughter who does not name herself, begins by relating this time of stress and need to the slightly better past on the farm. The girl’s mother, also unnamed, tries desperately to maintain self-respect in a situation she sees as a demeaning loss of social standing, even though she lives physically better in the town than on the farm.

Fate has flung us onto a street of poor people (it does not matter that we were poor before, that was a different kind of poverty), and the only way to take this, as she sees it, is with dignity, with bitterness, with no reconciliation. No bathroom with claw-footed tub and a flush toilet is going to comfort her, nor water on tap and sidewalks past the house and milk in bottles, nor even the two movie theatres and the Venus Restaurant and Woolworths so marvellous it has live birds singing in its fan-cooled corners and fish as tiny as finger-nails, as bright as moons, swimming in its green tanks. My mother does not care.

The father, more self-contained, more ironic, finds ways to live with Depression conditions and salvage his pride. As the story opens we see him walking with his daughter beside Lake Huron and telling her how the Great Lakes were gouged out of the earth by the ice coming down in great probing fingers from the north. Clearly the girl prefers her father’s company to her mother’s:

She walks serenely like a lady shopping, like a lady shopping, past the housewives in loose beltless dresses torn under the arms. With me her creation, wretched curls and flaunting hair bow, scrubbed knees and white socks—all I do not want to be. I loathe even my name when she says it in public, in a voice so high, proud and ringing, deliberately different from the voice of any other mother on the street.

Travelling his route of the desperate dusty farmlands, Ben Jordan makes fun of his situation by improvising as he rides a kind of endless ballad of his adventures on the road, and this becomes a kind of leitmotiv one day when he sets out with the girl and her brother and, leaving his Walker Brothers territory, takes them to a farmhouse where a woman who was once his sweetheart is living. The clean bare farmhouse with Catholic emblems on the walls and an old woman dozing in a corner becomes a kind of stage on which is revealed to the girl that people we know may have dimensions to their lives of which to this point we have been unaware. The sense of something theatrical and unreal and different from ordinary life is given by the fact that Ben Jordan and his old sweetheart Nora Cronin name each other, but nobody else in the story is named. The strangeness of the hitherto unknown past is framed within the nameless ordinariness of the present.

Source: George Woodcock, ‘‘The Plots of Life: The Realism of Alice Munro,’’ in Queen’s Quarterly, Vol. 93, No. 2, Summer 1986, pp. 235–43.

Up to a point, it is meaningful to divide Alice Munro’s characters into two categories—the secure and the insecure, or the adjusted and the maladjusted, or the accepted and the rejected—but a more than superficial examination reveals that these oppositions are quite inadequate to explain their real natures. Mrs. Munro’s world is neither consistent nor readily comprehensible; and as the reader struggles with its many paradoxes, contradictions, and ambiguities, he finds himself compelled to reassess characters and their motives, and ultimately to realize that ‘‘normal’’ characters in the conventional sense rarely exist in this world. On the surface, much seems straightforward—family relationships, ordinary friendships, love affairs—but there is always something gnawing at the edges of our certainties, and we recognize that the basic pattern in Alice Munro is isolation rather than community, rejection rather than acceptance. And though these kinds of relationships may in part be due to rural and small-town settings, the emphasis in most of her stories is psychological rather than sociological; the ultimate despair or resignation that the reader experiences is in part the product of the sense of inevitability and immutability that characterizes the various human relationships.

It is this vision of the world and of reality that strikes one in reading Alice Munro’s Dance of the Happy Shades, the title of which takes on an increasingly ironic note. The collection’s fifteen stories dramatize the contradictions between life and death, between happiness and despair, between freedom and captivity; and the ‘‘dance’’ itself, as it were, frequently reflects an element of the grotesque. The author’s use of a first-person narrator in eleven of these fifteen stories emphasizes her concern with the subjective dimensions of reality, and the fact that the narrator or reflector of the action is in most cases a young and sensitive girl anticipates the shifting nature of this reality. In a very real sense, the narrator stands uneasily between two positions: on the one hand, she is an active participant in, or even instigator of, the action, and on the other hand she stands apart from it as a kind of intuitive moral critic. In this ambivalent position she is not unlike R. D. Laing’s ‘‘divided self’’: a convincing representation of the idea that a more or less permanent state of tension is both inevitable and quite acceptable.

A basic pattern in most of these stories reveals the sensitive narrator-figure emerging through her experiences to a point where she senses, even though she cannot normally articulate the fact, that a kind of moral chaos rules everything, and that one can find nothing tangible or lasting to give security or meaning to life. ‘‘Things are getting out of hand, anything may happen,’’ the narrator reflects in the title story, and this theme of uncertainty and undefined fear is emphasized throughout the stories. In human terms, the various tensions are dramatized in situations described as. . . . ‘‘unconsummated relationships’’ which, in the words of one of the narrators, ‘‘depress outsiders perhaps more than anybody else.’’ We would perhaps agree with this narrator—and in a very real sense the reader is the ultimate outsider in any fictional experience—but it seems to me that this remark points to one of the many ambiguities in Alice Munro: is the unconsummated relationship as depressing as an outsider believes, or is it in fact, as far as the participants are concerned, a means of hanging on to whatever they have? R. D. Laing argues convincingly on this point when he states that ‘‘the ontologically insecure person is preoccupied with preserving rather than gratifying himself: the ordinary circumstances of living threaten his low threshold of security.’’ In this light, many of Alice Munro’s characters, such as Maddy in ‘‘The Peace of Utrecht,’’ Miss Marsalles in ‘‘Dance of the Happy Shades,’’ or Ben Jordan in ‘‘Walker Brothers Cowboy’’ assume a different dimension altogether, and their refusal or inability to fulfill themselves in a manner meaningful to the outsider might not be such a defeat after all.

Nevertheless, the recurring isolation and rejection pattern in these and other stories underscores the general sense of alienation which informs Mrs. Munro’s fiction. In ‘‘Walker Brothers Cowboy,’’ for example, this pattern is established at the outset through a momentary glimpse of the children who ‘‘separate into islands of two or one . . . occupying themselves in . . . solitary ways.’’ This situation is paralleled in the division within the Jordan family, particularly in the opposition between the mother and the rest of the family. An inward-turning and unimaginative person, Mrs. Jordan restricts herself to a very narrow range of experiences, deliberately closes her eyes on the realities of her world, and chooses to remain in the seclusion of her home, ‘‘always darkened by the wall of the house next door.’’ Ben Jordan, on the other hand, knows ‘‘the quick way out of town,’’ and travels constantly, outside his own territory. In this tendency, he finds sympathetic collaborators in his two children, particularly the daughter, who is the narrator of this story. Caught up in the tension between her father and mother, she is unable to sort out the impulses or motives of either; she is in league with her father, as it were, mainly because of the excitement provided by his travels, both within and outside his territory.

But Ben, too, is a participant in an ‘‘unconsummated relationship,’’ not only with his wife, but also in the tentative affair he is carrying on with Nora Cronin. He can pursue this relationship only so far, in part because of restrictive social and marital conventions, but also because he knows that it cannot really work out, and because he senses that a consummated affair would in fact destroy it. Nora clearly is the real loser in this kind of relationship. ‘‘‘I can drink alone,’’’ she tells Ben when he refuses to dance with her, ‘‘‘but I can’t dance alone’’’; and this is the real meaning of isolation and rejection brought down to an agonizingly tangible level. The meaning of this whole experience for Ben’s daughter is not clear, though she understands enough to realize that she is to say nothing to her mother about it. Its full significance is, however, both ambiguous and frightening:

I feel my father’s life flowing back from our car in the last of the afternoon, darkening and turning strange, like a landscape that has an enchantment on it, making it kindly, ordinary and familiar while you are looking at it, but changing it, once your back is turned, into something you will never know, with all kinds of weathers, and distances you cannot imagine.

In this incipient formulation of ideas, Ben’s daughter touches upon the ecstasies, the terrors, and the contradictions of existence; but the overriding idea is that of unpredictability and uncertainty. She feels isolated in time, and in this respect she stands apart from her father: ‘‘The tiny share we have of time appalls me,’’ she muses at one point, ‘‘though my father seems to regard it with tranquillity. . . He was not alive when this century started. I will be barely alive—old, old—when it ends. I do not like to think of it.’’ This fear of the disintegration of self recurs frequently in Alice Munro, and illustrates her essentially existential view of reality. In this vision, she is at times close to that of Samuel Beckett, and many of her situations evoke an echo of one of his basic questions, ‘‘How can one be sure in such darkness?’’

Source: H. Dahlie, ‘‘Unconsummated Relationships: Isolation and Rejection in Alice Munro’s Stories,’’ in World Literature in English, Vol. 11, No. 1, April 1972, pp. 43–45.