VOICES

Critical Analysis :

“Voices” by Alice Munro

In “Voices” by “Alice Munro’’ , the basic plot of the  story revolves around  Munro attending a local dance with her mother and coming across a female prostitute and one of her girls. Two men from the air force were seen comforting the girl and stroking her thigh on the stairs. At this point, the story has a tantalizing description of a young 10-year-old Munro’s adolescent introduction to the world of sexuality.

“Voices” was more like the mind simply thinking of an incident in the past, describing it and then leaving it for the thought of another. We feel in the beginning that the story deals with the relationship that Munro shares with her mother. Munro’s mother has been shown as a character who was never really happy with her position or status in the society. She tried all her methods to appear higher that what she originally was.

            “She said things like ‘readily’ and ‘indeed so’. She sounded as if she had grown u in some strange family who always talked that way. And she hadn’t. They didn’t. Out on their farms, my aunts and uncles talked the way everybody else did. And they didn’t like my mother very much either.”  

It is only later in the story that we realize that it was the introduction of Alice to the sexual world and her emergence from her innocent phase.

In the story, when she encounters a prostitute, she has no idea of what a prostitute is, yet she senses that there is something scandalous in the way everybody was behaving, especially her mother. Her mother asks her to leave immediately but when she goes upstairs to get her coat she sees the girl sitting with two Air Force men trying to comfort her. This is a memory that she senses and carries with her through her life.

            “Their hands blessed my own skinny thighs and their voices assured me that I, too, was worthy of love”.

Munro ends the story at an unexpected note wherein she talks about the young men who left the town for war. Some of them even died and those were the ones who were gone forever. This moment is the key to the story.     

            “And while they still inhabited my not yet quite erotic fantasies they were gone. Some, many, gone for good.”

Bibliography:
Munro, Alice. Dear Life. New York: Vintage, 2004. Print.
Pandey, Dr. Sanjay Prasad. “Beauty: Illusion or Reality.” The Achievers Journal 1.1. (2015) .pag. web <theachieversjournal.com>

By Akanksha Sharma

Reg. 11405093