Kara Goray
Craft Paper: The Biography
Runaway by Alice Munro
Alice Munro, a Brief Biography
Alice Laidlaw was born in 1931 in a rural Canadian town—Wingham, Ontario. She was the oldest of three children, and she always loved storytelling. She remembers inventing an alternate, happier ending for Hans Christian Anderson’s The Little Mermaid. Her father was a hunter, a trapper, and a fox-farmer. Her mother was a school teacher, and when she was twelve developed Parkinson’s Disease. She went to The University of Western Ontario on a scholarship. After her second year, she married Jim Munro. They moved to Vancouver and had children; Alice Munro became a housewife. She continued to write while raising her two daughters, and mentions this as one reason for her affinity for the short story (mothers don’t have a lot of time on their hands). Her husband thought of writing as “admirable.” In fact, later they moved to Victoria and opened a bookstore. There, Munro published her first collection of stories. In 1973, she divorced Jim Munro after 22 years of marriage. She moved back to Ontario and married Gerald Fremlin. They moved to a small town, close to the town where she grew up.
Alice Munro has won several literary prizes, including the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement (2009); she’s internationally acclaimed; she’s a Canadian gem and a triumph for the short-story. In 2013, she won the Nobel Prize for literature.
Kara Goray
Craft Paper: The Summaries
Runaway by Alice Munro
“Runaway,” “Soon,” and “Trespasses”: Three Summaries
- “Runaway”
Runaway is about a young woman, Carla, who lives with her husband Clark in a trailer. They board horses, give riding lessons, etc. Carla feels a particular kinship with their only goat, Flora, who keeps the horses company. It often seems like Clark is angry with Carla, which makes her cry. The weather has been rainy; business is bad and moods are low. And, Flora is missing.
Carla goes over to Sylvia Jamieson’s house to help her clean up the house. Carla starts crying, and tells Sylvia that she wants to run away. The two of them work out that she can take the bus and stay with a friend of Sylvia’s in Toronto. Carla borrows clothes and takes the bus. Mid-bus ride, Carla texts Clark and asks him to pick her up.
Later that evening he returns the clothes to Mrs. Jamieson and tells her not to interfere with his and his wife’s life anymore. While they’re talking, Flora shows up. But then the goat isn’t seen again. Carla learns of Flora’s appearance through a letter Mrs. Jamison writes her and wonders where Flora might be. But she never goes back to the Jamieson house.
- “Soon”
“Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence” are all about Juliet, at different stages of her life. In “Soon,” Juliet takes her thirteen-month old daughter, Penelope to visit her parents in Toronto.
Her father, Sam, has quit his teaching job to sell vegetables, and Sara, her frenetic mother, is in declining health. Irene, a young windowed mother helps them around the house. When Juliet is in the attic, she notices that they’ve taken down a print of a painting she gave them—I and the Village by Chagall. When she confronts her mother about the painting, Sara says that her father took it down because he didn’t want Irene to be uncomfortable.
An old classmate at the drugstore implies that Juliet has something to do with her father leaving teacher. Sam just says he got into an argument.
Juliet learns Irene’s story: her father abandoned her, her husband died, and her daughter has a cleft palate. A diabetic pastor comes to visit, Don. He and Juliet get into an argument about faith. He goes into diabetic shock, and Juliet gives him grape soda. Afterward, he leaves. Sara tells Juliet that her sort of faith, of prayer is “Soon I’ll see Juliet.” She goes back to Whale Bay. Months later her mother dies. Her father remarries. And, the “Soon I’ll see Juliet” haunts Juliet.
- “Trespasses”
Lauren is a ten-year-old, raised in a very peculiar fashion by her parents, Harry and Eileen. They treat her as an equal, she’s calls them by their first names, etc. Because of this, she feels isolated among her peers. One day, her father shows her a box, containing a box of ashes from their first child. (A pregnant-with-Lauren Eileen got into a car crash, which killed the baby in the back seat.)
Not long after, Lauren befriends a woman who works at the hotel’s front desk, Delphine. She starts to visit Delphine every day after school. Delphine begins to suggest that Lauren might be adopted, and Lauren asks her parents about this possibility. They firmly say know, and Eileen even shows her the scar on her stomach.
One day, Lauren has a stomach ache, so Delphine takes her up to her room for hot chocolate. While making the hot chocolate (and giving her a shot of whiskey), she tells her a story about her friend “Joyce,” hinting that she is Lauren’s real mother, and she had to put her up for adoption.
At home, an upset Lauren breaks down and tells Eileen everything. The next evening, Eileen and Harry wake up Lauren in the middle of the night; they’ve invited Delphine over. They reveal the first child that died in the car accident (also named Lauren) wasDelphine’s child. But, the baby that was in Eileen’s stomach was Lauren. The four of them spread Lauren #1’s ashes.
Kara Goray
Craft Paper: The Analysis
Runaway by Alice Munro
Human Characters: Alice Munro’s Runaway
Alice Munro’s short-story collection Runaway is human. It’s frightening how strong her characters are. That is what the reader thinks when they put down the book: Oh, these characters… Everything else—language, place, point of view, dialogue and summation—are tools to bring us this eerily truthful portraits of women. Her characterization in Runaway is stunning and haunting.
I.Language
Her language is simple; there’s no grandiose vocabulary, no overdrawn and melodramatic metaphors. But, she knows what details we need in order to see a character, their life, and their feelings. For example, In “Runaway,” Carla thinks of the when she ran away with Clark:
“You don’t know what you’re leaving behind,” her mother wrote her, in that one letter that she received, and never answered. But in those shivering moments of early-morning flight she certainly did know what she was leaving behind, even if she had a rather hazy idea of what she was going to. She despised her parents, their house, their backyard, their photo albums, their vacations, their Cuisinart, their powder room, their walk-in closets, their underground lawn-sprinkling system. In the brief note she had written she had used the word authentic.
I have always felt the need of a more authentic kind of life. I know I cannot expect you to understand this.” (Munro, 33)
Notice Munro’s eye for details, the little things, the things that make up middle class—“their backyard, their photo albums, their vacations, their Cuisinart” (Munro, 33). And her diction—she assigns Carla that one, heavily weighted word: authentic. “I have always felt the need of a more authentic kind of life,” Carla writes to her mother. It’s simple, but gives us such direct insight into Carla’s disillusioned-with-the-middleclass-lifestyle mindset.
Munro’s language is not dazzling or drowning with description and explanation. Instead, she leaves a sense of mystery, which adds to the humanity of the stories. For example, she opens “Chance” with a description of a Chagall painting—I and the Village. We don’t get a detailed explanation of what exactly the greens, the reds, the people, and the goat have to do with Juliet’s parents, Sara and Sam. Instead, Juliet just tells her friend Christa, “‘I mean, it makes me think of their life,’ Juliet said. ‘I don’t know why, but it does’” (Munro, 88). There’s truth in simple lines like this. We can’t articulate why a certain painting is important to us, or how it reminds us of our parents. But, through the painting, we get an expression of Sam, Sarah and Juliet. Expression over articulation—that is Munro’s writing.
II.Sense of Place
It’s not that Munro’s characters are not grounded in their place—they are grounded; they exist concretely in their worlds. But, in general there doesn’t seem to be an emphasis on place. Or perhaps it’s that her place is simple. Or perhaps ordinary. Or perhaps too familiar. At any rate, place is presented less vividly, particularly in comparison to of her characters.
Throughout the collection, we begin to see Canada, mostly rural Canada. Juliet’s three stories are the easiest example of the beginning of a Canadian landscape because we get Whale Bay, a little bit of Toronto, and then Vancouver. For example, in “Soon,” when Juliet goes to visit her parents, we see Toronto in the summer:
“The hardwood trees were humped over the far edge of fields, making blue-black caves of shade, and the crops and the meadows in front of them under the hard sunlight, were gold and green” (Munro, 94).
These descriptions of landscape are wonderful but scarce. For the most part, Munro’s “places” are rooms. Again, in “Soon,” we see the sunroom--“bamboo shades” and the “straight-backed chair” by Juliet’s bed (Munro, 98).
And, we can see this same emphasis on rooms, rather than the outdoors in “Trespasses,” too. She describes the town: “Every street had a curiosity—the Victorian mansion (now a nursing home), the brick tower that was all that was left of a broom factory, the graveyard going back to 1842” (Munro, 204). But the weight of the “place,” is again put on man-made rooms. Take for example the precision of Delphine’s room:
“The ceiling of her room sloped steeply on either side of a dormer window. There was a single bed, a sink, a chair, a bureau. On the chair a hot plate with a kettle on it. On the bureau a crowded array of makeup, combs and pills, a tine of tea bags and a tin of hot chocolate powder. The bedspread was of thin tan-and-white seersucker, like the ones on the guest beds.” (Munro, 216-217)
This emphasis on the room seems strategic. Homes, rooms are constructed by humans, by characters. What our rooms look like then must reflect us. So, the “place” of each character adds another element to her.
III.Use of Point of View
All of the stories are told in 3rd person, with omniscience tilted towards the central female character. Although it’s third person, the narrator adopts the tone of the central character.
This is particularly strong with Lauren in “Trespasses,” we see most everything through Lauren’s eyes and hear her voice. For example, we see Delphine and her stockings through the lens of Lauren: “Lauren had a particular feeling of disgust about feet in nylons out in the open, particularly touching any other cloth. This was just a private queer feeling—like the feeling she had about mushrooms, or cereal slopping around in milk” (Munro, 218).
And, when Delphine is in the middle of telling Lauren a story that implies her adoption, the narrator interrupts us with “If you were old enough for your hair to be white, then is shouldn’t be long,” and we hear Lauren’s young, scared voice (Munro, 221).
This third-person omniscience allows Munro to slip into other character’s minds occasionally (for example, Sylvia in “Runaway”), while staying focused on her central character. But, rarely do we see inside a male character’s mind directly. The men are complex through their dialogue and actions (for example, Juliet’s father Sam in “Soon), but they are not the lens through which we see the story. I think if the lens (not necessarily the characters, but the lens) of the story is too far removed from the author, “Truth” becomes in jeopardy.
But, because of the heavy use of letters and diaries in her stories, we also get a decent dose of “first-person.” In fact, the first section of “Powers” is Nancy’s diary, so it’s basically third person. Actually, it’s a bit disorienting to read at first. The entire collection is in third person. Letters written to other characters are always brief—certainly not as lengthy as the section of Nancy’s diary. It’s odd to hear a character’s voice so strongly—“If ever I am seriously ill I hope I am able to destroy this diary or go through and stroke out any mean things in it, in case I die.”—and not filtered through a narrator (Munro, 272). I think perhaps that Munro’s characters are so strong and so real that without the filter of a narrator, they might be too glaring.
IV.Use of Dialogue and Summation.
Munro uses dialogue and summation masterfully. She knows what we need to hear from the characters, and what we don’t.
For example, in “Trespasses,” when we hear an overwhelmed Lauren “miserably” tell Delphine,“‘I don’t even know this person Joyce,’” our heart aches more than it would have if we’d just been told that she was feeling anxious about the similarity between Delphine’s story and Lauren’s life (Munro, 221). There’s power in hearing the character’s voice directly, particularly when the voice is so distinct like Lauren’s.
But some revelations don’t belong in dialogue; they need distance. And, Munro is aware of that. In “Runaway,” Sylvia reveals her affection for Carla to her friends:
“‘Maybe it’s because Leon and I never had children,’ she said. ‘It’s stupid. Displaced maternal love.’”
Her friends spoke at the same time, saying in slightly different ways something to the effect that it might be stupid but it was, after all, love” (Munro, 21).
We need to hear Sylvia’s hesitation through her own voice, but we don’t need to see her entire conversation between her friends. In fact that would be both distracting from the characters and the plot. All we need is a summation of the conversation: “it was, after all, love” (Munro, 21).
V.Characterization
Incredibly, beautifully, and scarily accurate: those are Alice Munro’s characters. Her stories (like she remarked about fiction in the Rural Roots interview) “celebrate the essential mystery of people.” We see the characters. We see their mystery. They are real. It’s difficult to pinpoint exactly how she creates them, makes them painfully close to life. It seems to me that every piece of her writing works towards characterization, towards creating a very real person out of words.
We see the character from different angles—their physical appearance, their voice, and also their subconscious through their dreams. In “Runaway,” we see Carla dream of Flora running away, and in “Soon,” we see Juliet dream of her father watering the plants (Munro, 7 and 116). These dreams aren’t interpreted for us, of course. They’re just presented, as another facet to the character.
We’re given careful details about the characters, like with Delphine in “Trespasses”: “She believed a woman should keep her hands nice, no matter what kind of work she had to do. She liked to wear inky-blue or plum fingernail polish. And she liked to wear earrings, big and clattery ones, even at her work. She had no use for the little button kind.” (Munro, 210).
We see Delphine with clarity; we can picture her. Yet, we don’t feel like we know her with certainty. We see her turn from chatty front desk woman to silent, mourning mother in the backseat of the car. She is not one “plum fingernail polish” image; she is several images; she is a person. Even characters we don’t see all that much, like Clark in “Runaway” are complex: [Clark’s] friendliness, compelling at first, could suddenly turn sour” (Munro, 7). It’s not as simple as having a constant temper—it “suddenly [turns] sour” (Munro).
Munro’s characters are real because they’re shifting and fluid. In that same Rural Roots interview, she says “This is how real people hit us; they’re several different people. They’re not perhaps as clearly and simply outlined as the characters in fiction are.” But, I don’t think her characters are “simply outlined.” In fact, the depth and mystery behind these characters is incredible, beautiful and haunting. I think she captured real people in characters.
Alice Munro’s writing in Runaway is character-based. Practically everything seems to be for the sake of getting to the heart of a character (only to tragically discover that there is no one “heart” to a character, but several sides). Her characters are so real that they haunt us. Yet, despite this haunting of reality, her emphasis on “the character” is also beautiful. Perhaps that’s because that’s how life should be—an emphasis on people rather than plot.