Alice Munro’s Works On "Run Away" Theme

After reading many of Alice Munro’s works, you might find that the leading characters written by this author generally reflect a common theme of “Run Away”. As a female writer, she focuses on the theme of women’s escape that is increasingly emphasized in the international literary world. She has captured the desire and dissatisfaction, struggle and frustration of modern women in ordinary life from a sensitive and subtle perspective, connecting women’s escape and power with their rights of speech, and women’s escape is regarded as the product of awakening of women’s awareness to disclose a necessary path of women during their self-growth. In addition, Munro is also a writer good at thinking about life, and she used the realistic method to present the psychological trauma and persistent impact on common people caused by death in her works with the theme of “Run Away”. Starting from the formation of “Run Away” theme, based on Alice Munro’s representative works, this thesis will explore the multi-dimensional presentation of the theme of “Run Away” in her works, and the ultimate significance of “Run Away” will be discussed from the two perspectives of the negative indication of “Run Away” and the sublimation. The main part of this thesis consists of three chapters.The first chapter mainly discusses the close correlation between the three aspects of the formation of “Run Away” theme, the escape complex in western literatures, the history, culture, tradition and regional introduction of Canada and the personal experience and identity perspective of Munro. By focusing on the escape complex in western literatures, the first section discusses the original motive for human to generate the escape behavior, which is traced back to the presentation of the motif of escape in western literatures, and it is disclosed that the common intention for the writers create the theme of “Run Away” is humanistic care of the common spirit shackles and survival difficulty for human being. In the second section, with Munro’s identity of a “Canadian writer” as the background, efforts have been made to introduce the Canadian history and culture of being colonized and its immigrant composition, and interpret these factors’ impact on the theme of escape in the regional writing of Alice Munro. By combining the biography and interviews of Alice Munro, the third section introduces the writer’s growth and her writing career closely related to her growth, trying to explore the internal creation motive for the theme of “Run Away” from the perspectives of her identity and real life.The second chapter discusses the multi-dimensional presentation of the “Run Away” theme. In accordance with the escaped objects, through intensive reading of the text, the discussion is conducted on the two aspects of women escaping from their family and lover and human running away from death. The first part investigates the two dimensions of women’s escape, and Maslow’s theory of needs hierarchy is introduced to discuss the important influence of individual need on the escape behavior. The reasons for women to run away from their family and lover are also discussed: on the one hand, they initiatively run away from such relation because their personal safety and social requirements are not satisfied; on the other hand, under the oppression of patriarchy and male authority, they run away as rebellion, trying to obtain the right of speech and their own spiritual space. The second part introduces the depiction of the theme of human, who is growing up, running away from death in novels. Through the delicately treated material of character running away from death in the novel, Alice Munro discusses the possibility of the character to continue a normal life after running away from death, in this way to disclose the indelible influence of death on life, and it expresses Munro’s thinking of human spiritual death and redemption.In the third chapter, by combining the multi-dimensional presentation of the theme of “Run Away” in Munro’s works, the significance of escape is explored on both positive and negative aspects from the two perspectives of women’s escape and character’s escape. In the first section, the dual significances of women’s escape are discussed. Part I interprets the tragedy of women who have nowhere to flee to. The character tries to challenge the Foucauldian power and rules by using escape as a rebellion approach, and due to the failure of the reconstruction of subjective consciousness, she finally has to compromise and submit to the powerful. Part II positively illustrates the positive significance of women’s escape and the awakening and rise of women’s awareness. The second section analyzes the dual significances of human escape. In the first part, after the human ran away from death, they tried self-redemption without success, which discloses the incurable trauma left on people’s spirit by death. In the second part, with Munro’s personal experience as the background, Munro have written many characters who do not run away from death but confront it, and they realize their value of life by cherishing the present, which presents Munro’s positive view of life and death of confronting death and her philosophical view of respecting life.