A Study Of Narrative Strategies In Alice Munro’s Runaway

Alice Munro is the first short story novelist who won the Nobel Prize for literature.She has produced thirteen short stories and one novel.As her most famous masterpiece,the story collection Runaway contains eight stories.Its writing style is concise and unadorned,and it puts fragmented language together to tell the life of normal people in Canadian towns.The narrative strategy refers to the narrative method or art adopted by authors to achieve a predetermined text effect.On the guide of narratology,together with the comparative analysis and literature intensive reading,this paper makes narrative analysis of the story collection Runaway from the perspectives,space-time,irony,and characterization,aiming to highlight the exquisite narrative strategy and delicate and novel creative feelings of it.Through summary and induction,several findings have come to light.Firstly,there are multiple narrative perspectives in this story collection.Among these perspectives,the God-like omniscient perspective is applied in seven stories except Powers.It controls the narrative process with the all-known pattern and provides story background and clues;while the inspirational internal perspective adopted by all stories in this story collection uses the first-person limited pattern to show characters’ cognition and feelings,implying the author’s insight into characters’ personality traits and epiphany moment;besides,in three stories,such as Chance,Silence,and Power,the unreliable special perspective is employed to deconstruct the illusion through unreliability within or between narratives,highlighting the maladjustment of characters’ psychological state.Secondly,in terms of narrative space-time,the bewildering narrative space-time has been discussed in this paper.For instance,in three stories Soon,Powers,and Runaway,the multiline intersection space-time structure presents stories in a complicated way,depicting the changeable life paths of characters;while in four novels,such as Chance,Passion,and Powers,the spatiotemporal transformation technique is adopted to break up reality and memory and reorganize them,constructing a compact new framework and enhancing their readability;and in other four stories,such as Trespasses,Chance,and Runaway,the virtuality-reality combination adds unpredictable changing factors and the mysterious dark space-time charm for stories,which implies the rapid and scattered social rhythm brought about by industrialization after World War II.Thirdly,there are three forms of irony in all eight stories.Among them,the onlooking alienation is applied in Passion,Runaway,and Trespasses;while in four stories,such as Chance,Silence,and Soon,the light-dark comparison is adopted;and in other four stories,such as Passion,Powers,and Runaway,the self-deprecating disguise is employed.The author places the ironic spirit on them,which reveals malicious ridicules and unpredictable contradictions and crises in life,and reshapes the truth in her heart.Finally,in terms of characterization,there are freak characters in all eight stories.After World War II,the culture of Canadian towns was marginalized.The ordinary people are struggling to find a sense of belonging in the Anglo-American cultural community.However,the freak characters are distorted by their identity conflict with their gender or realistic context.They cannot change the reality,dominate their life,and finally lose themselves,which demonstrates the ambiguity and uncertainty in the life pursuit of the postmodernist era.From the narrative perspective,this paper thoroughly elaborates on the narrative strategies in the story collection Runaway,which not only enriches the narrative research of Munro’s works but also helps to inspire readers to reflect on the social issues in the Canadian transition period.