Speaking silences: Narrative, social and metafictional reverberations in selected stories by Alice Munro

This thesis explores Alice Munro's inclusion of silences in the experiences of her characters and the narrative techniques she uses to present those silences to the reader in The Moons of Jupiter, The Progress of Love and Friend of My Youth. Her characters keep silence, are silenced, impose silence and break silence in their relationships with other characters and in their treatment of themselves. Her narrators sometimes refuse, or are unable because of insufficient knowledge, to provide pieces of information about a character or to close a story. This thesis examines how and why her characters do not "say" and how and why Alice Munro does "say" by speaking of these silences in her fiction. Through her own interrogation of the silences she associates with her characters, Munro reveals a concern with issues of classism, racism and gender-relations which influence, and are influenced by, these silences.;This thesis attempts to counter the notion of silence as predominantly absence by exploring the significance of the presence which Alice Munro grants to silence in her fiction. (Abstract shortened by UMI.).