Alice Munro is a critically well-regarded Canadian short-story writer. In October 2013, at age 82, Munro was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature. Munro is the first Canadian woman to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first woman to win the literature prize since Herta Mueller in 2009, and only the 13th female recipient of the literature prize since it was founded in 1901. Additionally, she's the first Canadian writer to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature since Saul Bellow, who won the honor in 1976.
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Alice Munro / Runaway Analysis
1.
2. Alice Munro is a critically well-
regarded Canadian short-story
writer.
Biography
3. PRICES ● 1968: she received her first Governor General's Award
for fiction. Dance of the Happy Shades.
● Munro received her second Governor award in 1998,
for The Progress of Love.
In 2005, TIME magazine named Munro a TIME 100
Honoree.
In 2009, Munro won the Man Booker International Prize.
She published the short-story collection Too Much
Happiness.
In October 2013, Munro was awarded the 2013 Nobel Prize
in Literature. Munro is the first Canadian woman to
receive the Nobel Prize for Literature.
5. Dance of the happy shades (1968)
Who DO YOU THINK You ARE? (1978)
hateship, friendship, courtship, loveship, marriage (2001)
The Lives of Girls and Women (1971)
7. The book was published in 2004. In the story,
Munro uses a feminist critical approach. Derives
from firm political and ideological commitments
and insists that literature both reflects and
influences human behaviour in the larger world.
Often, this approach has practical or political aims.
Feminist thought endeavours both to extend
contemporary attention to distinctively female
concerns, ideas, and accomplishments and to
recover the largely unrecorded history of women
in earlier times.
CONTEXT
8. Narrative
The External Narrator:Vision With
Non-Linear/ Achronological
A Narrator who presents the story from the perceptual and
experiential point of view of a character or several
characters. The Narrator does not express independent
judgments, but reports the perceptions, thoughts and feelings of
the character.
-“Up until three years ago, Carla had never really looked at
mobile homes. She hadn’t called them that, either.”-
-“And Sylvia could not help feeling that, with every moment of
this show of misery, the girl made herself more ordinary, more
like one of those soggy students in her—Sylvia’s—office.”-
9. ❖ Parallels Between Goat and Girl
Munro describes the goat's behavior in ways that mirror
Carla's relationship with Clark.
❖ Symbolism
Flora,happiness
and hope
10. One of the central themes if the story is actually
indicated in its title, as it points out the various ways
that we all run away from aspects of our life. There
are multiple runaways such as Carla, Flora, Clark
and Carla’s marriage and Sylvia Jamieson’s
involvement in Carla’s life.
Running away is something that dominates the
thoughts and minds of the two major female
characters, and Munro shows in this story that
sometimes the biggest acts of running away do not
necessarily involve motion.
THEMES
11. Clothing: The image of clothing is used to depict
how some things simply do not ‘fit’ the person
who is ‘wearing’ them.
Travel and modes of transportation: The
symbolism of travel and modes of transportation
speak to the idea of, again, self-realization and
self-identity
Flora, Clara’s pet goat: Flora is a test of Carla’s
relationship with her husband. When Carla
ponders at the end of the story on the goat being
dead, this is foreshadowing for what she believes
could happen to her by staying with Clark
12. Runaway is the first story in Alice Munro collection of the same title. The story involves a
woman who acts upon a strong desire for escape from a stifling life.
● - Carla runaway because of her abusive husband Clark.
- Clark’s runaway temper
- Sylvia runaway
emotional involvement
- Flora, Carla's pet goat, who mysteriously disappear and
later come back but later on the goat gone again.
ANALYSIS
13. Characters
● Carla: Antagonist?
● Clark: In Munro’s words “His
friendliness,compelling at
first,could suddenly turn sour”
● Sylvia
● Flora: Unpredictable
14. ● Runaway is a book of stories about
love and its infinite betrayals and
surprises.
