DIMENSIONS

Critical Analysis:

DIMENSIONS 

 About Author Alice Munro

Canadian author Alice Munro is known as the ―master of contemporary the short story‖ (Wikipedia). She is the creator of contemporary short stories and has changed the definition of short story. Known as ―Canadian Chekhov‖ Munro won many literary awards including the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013.She won Canada’s Governor eneral’s award thrice in her life and received Man Booker Prize in 2009.

“Dimensions” was first published in The New Yorker on June 5, 2006. The story is about a young Woman Doree, who was always dominated by her husband and was unable to explore her individual identity, but who moves towards emancipation in an epiphanic moment.

Alice Ann Munro was born Alice Laidlaw on 10 July 1931 in Wingham which is located in the Canadian province of Ontario. Most of Munro’s stories are set in Huron Country in southwestern Ontario. Strong regional focus is one of the key features of her fiction.

Southwestern Ontario, surrounded on three sides by Lake Huron, is mainly an agricultural land. In the 19th century many large and small towns started to flourish there because of accessible boat transport and water- power driven mills (Atwood). The Donnelly’s Massacre1 in

Ontario had great impact on the people of this region. Violence, crime, subdued emotions – all these were part of south-west Ontario’s people’s lives and Munro’s stories were greatly influenced by these real life experiences.

Alice Munro has been writing fiction since she was in seven or eight grade. Her initial inspiration was the ―dreadfully sad‖ ending of Hans Christian Andersen’s story ―The Little Mermaid‖(Popova).So, when she finished reading that story, she decided to write another story with a happy ending. Because Munro thought that the little mermaid deserved something other than the death. As Margaret Atwood has noted, becoming a writer from a small town like southwestern Ontario, was really an unusual idea in 1930s and1940s.After all, even in the 1950s or 60s, there were only few text book publishers in Canada. Nevertheless, Munro never felt unsure of herself as a writer. As she notes, she was always an extremely devoted artist who knew her goal perfectly.

Summary:-

When I read Alice Munro’s ‘Dimension’ I feel like I’m standing at the edge of an ice shelf in Antarctica that is about to break apart and collapse into the icy waters, taking me along with it. I gather ominous signs; I hear deep rumblings, I feel the ice underneath my feet sway slightly but I have no idea what is about to happen until the very last moment when it happens.

 In this story, Munro deploys her formidable story-telling abilities to create and sustain a sense of foreboding right from the get-go to the climax of the story about halfway through the story (more on this unusual structure later). As a reader, I feel myself dragged inexorably along with the narrative arc of the story, reeled in inch by inch by Munro’s prescient ability to reveal just the right amount of information about her characters and their circumstances to sustain my interest in the story.

The main structure of the story is a little unusual in that the climax occurs approximately halfway through the story with the denouement taking up the final half. Given the length of the denouement, we can surmise that what Munro really wants to explore is not so much the events leading up to the climax but the aftermath of the climax. The climax in this story is a tragic event that involves the lives of the members a working class Canadian family; Doree, the wife, Lloyd the husband and their three children. Munro opens the story in the aftermath of the tragic event and very skillfully weaves in the events and circumstances leading up to the tragic event by intermittent flashbacks. Immediately following the climax of the story, when the tragic event is revealed, the story shifts to how the protagonists (Doree and Lloyd) deal with the fallout from their actions (or non-actions, as the case may be) that resulted in the tragic event. It is this exploration of how the protagonists deal with the consequences of their actions that is the emotional underpinning of the story. One of the things I’m amazed by with Munro’s story is her ability to condense the complex inner lives of her characters. Instead, we can sense Doree’s nervousness by the word games she plays in her head on the bus trip to the prison showing the description of the  inner psychological state of her characters. We also learn about Lloyd’s insufferable arrogance by the way he talks about medical professionals and the way he talks to Doree.

In the next paragraph, Munro introduces Mrs. Sands without really telling us who she is and her relationship to Doree but we can glean from the description of their interaction that she is acting as a counselor of some sort to Doree. Everything we’ve read up to this point seems to confirm that Doree must have done something wrong in the past and is trying to turn over a new leaf. At the very end of the paragraph, Munro deftly insinuates ‘death’ into the discussion and all of a sudden, the ante is upped. We know that someone, likely Doree had done something wrong, and a life had been taken. The foreshadows lengthen.

The next paragraph, the first of many flashbacks, fills in the backstory of Doree’s family mainly how she met Lloyd and married him. In this paragraph, we see early inklings about Lloyd’s character by the opinions he holds about medical professionals.

The end of this paragraph is where we see Munro’s genius at work. At first glance the last line of the paragraph, ‘Sasha was born’, seems to and does follow naturally from the description of Doree’s family life. But, given the ominous foreshadowing already at play and given what we know at this point, the fact that Munro ends the paragraph abruptly with that stark sentence and reverts to the aftermath narrative of the story leaves us deeply unsettled. The ante has just been upped again. We know that a. someone, possibly Doree had done something wrong b. a life was taken and now c. that life could possibly be a child’s.

The next paragraph finally dispels any suspicion about Doree’s culpability. We know that it is this person that Doree is spending hours on the bus for that is the guilty one (The first two times I never saw him…He wouldn’t come out.) We can probably already guess at this point that that person must be Lloyd. Throughout the story until the climax is reached, Munro continues to alternate between the present time frame in the aftermath of the tragic event and the time frame leading up to the tragic event. She also continues to fill out Lloyd’s character as an arrogant, controlling, chauvinistic know-it-all who detests people in authority especially if they are in the medical profession and especially if they are women.

Munro continues to turn the reader against Lloyd by leaking more and more details about his paranoid nature, going through Doree’s dresser looking for birth-control pills, berating Doree for spending time with Maggie. Munro also shows us Doree’s role in her marriage, as a long-suffering wife who has no other plan for her life than to be a good mother and supporter of her husband. She is willing to put up with his paranoia, his put downs, his criticisms, his smug pronouncements because she is scared of losing him, scared of losing the one thing in her life that held any meaning for her.

As in the following paragraph’s, Lloyd’s paranoia increased to a great extent, as he killed his own children.And may be for the first time in life Doree wanted him to be wrong, both emotionally and mentally, proving him, that he is the crazy one.

The story would of course not be complete without an exploration of Lloyd’s state of mind in the aftermath of his crime. Munro accomplishes this through a letter he sends to Doree. This is the point where Munro unearths perhaps the central irony of the story; that this monster, this pig of a man who murdered his own children, should be the one who receives the privilege of inner peace when Doree the long-suffering wife whose life was devastated by him is still in deep turmoil. As if that wasn’t enough, the irony continues in the second letter, when Lloyd becomes her savior as it were by showing her a way out of the morass of her emotional pain.

But thankfully, Munro gives Doree a way out. In dramatic fashion, she has Doree witness an accident and (thanks to Lloyd’s training) was able to save the life of the victim. Doree realizes from this experience that ‘she was put on earth’ not to just ‘be with him and try to understand him’. No, she has another role, to keep the boy alive. Yes, it is because of Lloyd that she is able to perform this heroic act but in this small act of saving his life, she stumbles on an alternative track for her emotional train that had Lloyd as a distant, magical destination that she will never arrive at.

Bibliography:
Bosman, Julie. “Alice Munro wins Noble Prize in Literature”, nytimes.com. The New York
Munro, Alice nytimes.com. The New York, npage. Web<http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2006/06/05/dimension>
Panday, Dr.Sanjay Prasad. “Beauty: Illusion or Reality”. The Achiever’s Journal 1.1(2015) npage. Web < theachieversjournal.com>

By Subham Dhar

Reg. 11204485