FICTION

Critical Analysis:

Its a big story, involving several well-developed characters and covering a considerable amount of time

As the story opens we see Jon and Joyce, a couple living a basic life (below expectations their families held for them). Jon is a woodworker, Joyce teaches music. But Jon begins to get too close to his apprentice, Edie, and soon Joyce moves out of their house. Theres no great drama here, which is a relief. This isnt a story about broken marriages, even though over the very rapid passage of time in the story we see several. And finally we arrive at the present and Joyce comes face to face with someone from her past, which leads to something of an epiphany for her.

It is something like a triangle?with happiness,unhappiness and love arranged with an equal distance between each point?

Perhaps.Certainely there are triangles in "Fiction",shifting alliances and fractures.

The kind of happiness discussed in Fiction is different from other stories,In Fiction it doesn't seem to be a light feeling,but a more solid-if not heavy-sensation.

The rhythm of Joyce's daily life is very different from Jon's.She seems to believe that his woodworking affords the potential for something pure.Jon spends time in solitude Edie does not believe in evolution. Edie does not shed her days work nor does she shed her skin.

Joyce has tried to get some perspective on the situation. She seeks to appear neutral, distanced, controlled.

The final segment presents Joyce-transformed. Once music teacher, but now a professional cellist. Once Jons beloved, now Matts third wife.

And perhaps because she is now attuned to the subtle (and dramatic) transformations that can occur, across a lifetime or overnight, she recognizes the potential in Edies daughter. Who, one night, is dressed in black, a sombre and mysterious figure at a party. And on another day she is rosy, pink, and all-a-bloom.

Joyce feel that emotion (which Joyce didn't feel at the time), the two cannot connect through the story. I love what this seems to illustrate about fiction-- how it is both magic and impotent at the same time. I actually liked the ending. It shows that Joyce, in her way, is a storyteller, too. She too transforms events--in this case, into self-deprecating humor.

Joyce has never understood this business of lining up to get a glimpse of the author and then going away with a strangers name written in your book.

She doesn't even know if she will read the book. She has a couple of good biographies on the go at the moment that she is sure are more to her tasIn The View from Castle Rock, the young Alice remarks upon this capacity.

She has it too, this ability to write about things and fundamentally change them, to consume them, to pull forth their secret and plentiful messages.

“The town, unlike the house, stays very much the same—nobody is renovating or changing it. Nevertheless it has changed for me. I have written about it and used it up. Here are more or less the same banks and hardware and grocery stores and the barbershop and the Town Hall tower, but all their secret, plentiful messages for me have drained away.”

Christie is a pained and tortured figure in one environment, but elsewhere, just a few days later, she is resurrected as a fiction writer.te than this will be.

How Are We to Live is a collection of short stories, not a novel. This in itself is a disappointment. It seems to diminish the books authority, making the author seem like somebody who is just hanging on to the gates of Literature, rather than safely settled inside.

Through a story about a small town music teacher, which hits far too close to home, Joyce discovers how her obsession with Jon and his new wife affected Edie's little child. Joyce then attempts to reconcile with the now the writer, presumably the daughter, now grown-up. The encounter exposes Joyce as an unreliable narrator and goes to show Munro's understanding of people, how they function, how they react. It describes the fictions people spin in their minds, how a life inevitably revolves solely around itself.

And Alice Munro does have a way of transforming full and complicated lives into short fictions, doesnt she. And we, as readers, can wriggle our toes in the grass.

Bibliography:

Munro,Alice.Fiction.Newyork:Vintage,2007.Print.

Munro,Alice.Too Much Happiness.Newyork:Vintage,2009.Print.

Munro,Alice.Silence.Newyork:Vintage,2004.Print.

By K.Sumanth

Reg. 11408269