Analysis Of The Manipulation Of Narrative Order In Alice Munro’s Short Stories

Alice Munro was praised by Cynthia Ozick as the modern Chekhov. However, her style of writing is different from his. Indeed, hers is different from that of many other short story writers. Many modern critics such as John Orange and Lawrence Mathews point out that there are plenty shifts, disruptions, and disarrangements in Munro’s short stories. However, few of them pay attention to how these shifts and disruptions are pieced together into one story.This thesis has relied on Gerard Genette’s theory of "order" to analyze the arrangement of narrative order in three stories by Munro, namely,"Friend of My Youth,""Wigtime," and "Chance." These stories were published respectively in January1990, September1989, and June2004in New Yorker. They typically represent the kind of narrative technique that the author seems fond of. The purpose of the analysis is to find out the common features of the temporal arrangements in these stories and the effects of such arrangements.The study has found four common features among the temporal arrangements of the three stories. First, the temporal gap between the starting point of the narrative and the time when the past events occur enables the narrator or the major character to look back on her past in a distanced and more objective manner. The thinking on the past by the narrator or the major character is presented to the reader by the end of the story. Second, all the three stories have two story lines. The transitions between the two story lines at the macro-narrative level in each story highlight the thinking on the past by the narrator or the major character. Third, each story line in the three stories consists of a double linear temporal structure. Fourth, the special temporal arrangements of the three stories at both the macro-narrative level and the micro-narrative level create multiple layers of meaning for the three stories.This thesis has also conducted a study on the anachrony used in each section of the three stories. It finds that the anachrony used most often by Munro is external partial analepsis. There are two reasons for this. First, the reach of the anachrony used by Munro is usually much longer than the temporal duration of the story line upon which the anachrony is embedded. Second, the extent of the anachrony used by Munro is usually very short. The event involved in the anachrony usually ends before the first narrative begins.