Alice Munro: The Stories of Runaway

Abstract

This essay will analyze and explicate the stories in Munro’s latest collection, Runaway, in order to present the reader with a description of her artistic interests, motifs and techniques in this work. The author finds remarkable similarities among the stories, even as they explore very different female characters and situations. The author notes the delicacy and precision with which Munro tracks the progress of her characters’ thoughts and feelings, often in a kind of interior dialogue with themselves. Love, or its absence, is the usual subject matter in the stories – most often between a woman and a man, but sometimes between parent and child – and the author shows how Munro’s characters deal with the “old confusions or obligations” engendered by this emotion. Finally, the author cites several examples in describing Munro’s style of presenting her characters, one typified by colloquial and self-deprecating dialogue, but punctuated at times by language of great poetic and emotional power.