Women's Narrative in Alice Munro's Short Story Runaway

Abstract

Alice Munro, the contemporary Canadian English-language writer who proved the importance of the short story as a genre by receiving the Nobel Prize in 2013, is undoubtedly an interesting author in terms of researching women's narrative. Although most of Munro's stories are set in the Harron Country, by using those regional features, customs, and traditions, Munro creates universal texts just like William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor of his time. Like Faulkner and O'Connor, Munro's characters often confront deep-rooted and time-worn customs or traditions, but Munro's characters' reactions are generally less severe than those of his Southern counterparts. In addition, Munro's male characters are of one type, monotonous and boring, while female characters are more complex, peculiar and distinctive. The present paper analyses Alice Munro's short story collection Runaway (2004), paying particular attention to the title story. The collection consists of eight short stories. The main unifier of the stories about women of seemingly different ages and statuses is the desire to escape, which is caused by various reasons (unhappy marriage, family problems, running away from a provincial town in search of adventure). It is also interesting that the second, third and fourth stories of the collection tell about the same character, Juliet, and different episodes and stages of her life, which Pedro Almadovar even made into a movie in 2016. While Munro divides the story of "Juliet" into three independent stories, but united by the main character, the eighth story of the collection is in five parts and covers the life of the main character, Nancy. This decision of Munro is not accidental, and with this action, he once again emphasizes the innovations he brought to the genre of the story.