Canadian Rustic Life in the Short Stories of Alice Munro

Abstract

Alice Munro is widely acknowledged as one of the most leading short-story writers, not in Canada, but in the English speaking world. She is the 13th woman writer in the world and first Canadian authoress and only short story writer ever to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. She received Canada s Governor General s Award for fiction thrice, the Man Booker International Prize for lifetime achievement in 2009, as well as O Henry Award in the US, the Canada Australia Literary Prize and the Commonwealth Writers Prize for short fiction. For her ways of writing short stories and narrative techniques, she has been regarded as The Canadian Chekhov, and writer s writer. newlineMunro presents everyday situation from rural Canada; her characters are common people of Canadian society. Her stories offer human complexities, themes of love, relationships between men and women, coming of age, lives of girls and women, rural life existence and stuff of ordinary life. The setting of her stories is rural Canada, especially Southern Ontario region. For Munro, the plot of her story is of secondary impertinence, everything is based on her women characters. Her omniscient narrators make the sense of the world and settings of her stories are compared to rural South of United States. As she has no heroes, her male characters are equal to nothing (has no existence in her stories), but her girls and women are more complex. newlineMunro s art of storytelling and setting is different from other story writers; as her girls and women are real to life. She presented her characters observed by her from time to time. Most of her characters and situations are real and considered autobiographical. Her stories reveal truth and ambiguity of life. Her theory explores elements of epiphany, Gothicism, bildungsroman in simple prose style, feminism, psychological and autobiographical elements. newlineThe world in Munrovian stories appears as the actual world, which she lived in. her stories do not follow the fashionable ways of writing or her themes are not eye-catchin