Introduction
Dear Life is a collection of 14 short stories, written by Alice Munro is published in 2012 by McClelland and Stewart. The central theme of the stories as a whole focuses on the lives of women, how they live and think, and how they challenge the expectations of family, friends, and society.At the end of “Dear Life” is a suite of four stories that Munro says are,
“autobiographical in feeling, though not, sometimes, entirely so in fact,”
And she adds: “I believe they are the first and last — and the closest — items I have to say about my own life.”
About Alice Munro
Alice Munro is a Canadian Short Story Writer. She is the author of 13 collections of stories, including Dear Life, and one novel, Lives of Girls and Women. She has received many awards and prizes, including three of Canada’s Governor General’s Literary Awards and the National Book Critics Circle Award in the US.She was shortlisted for the 1980 Booker Prize for The Beggar Maid and was shortlisted for The Man Booker International Prize in 2007. Munro was awarded The Man Booker International Prize in 2009 for her overall contribution to fiction on the world stage.
Settings in Dear Life
Dear Life is primarily set in small, rural towns in Ontario. This is significant because, as with so many of the autobiographical elements of the stories, Munro grew up in a small Ontario town, with a farmer father and a schoolteacher mother. Many of the main characters attempt to escape the small towns because they feel trapped, as in “Leaving Maverley” and “Gravel.” Success for many of these characters means getting out of these small towns that can stifle creativity and feel more like a prison of expectations than a home.
However, the small towns are also framed as a source of comfort for characters who have left and found struggles exist outside of their hometowns, too, as in “Haven.” Settings outside of small-town Southern Ontario, such as Vancouver, or the United States, are typically held up as symbols of freedom and opportunity.
Themes Of Dear Life
Dear Life” by Alice Munro explores various themes, one of the most central is confronting mortality and reflecting on a life lived. This theme manifests in several ways:The Narrator’s Age
As an older woman, the narrator grapples with her ageing and the approach to death. She reflects on her experiences and choices, questioning whether they were the right ones.
As an older woman, the narrator grapples with her ageing and the approach to death. She reflects on her experiences and choices, questioning whether they were the right ones.
Memories
The story heavily relies on the narrator’s memories, ranging from childhood events to more recent ones. These memories serve as a way to understand her past, navigate her present, and come to terms with the inevitable end of life.
The story heavily relies on the narrator’s memories, ranging from childhood events to more recent ones. These memories serve as a way to understand her past, navigate her present, and come to terms with the inevitable end of life.
Loss
The story touches on various forms of loss, including the death of family members, the deterioration of relationships, and the passage of time itself. Examining these losses allows the narrator to appreciate what she has left and find meaning in her life.
Autobiographical Touch
Alice Munro’s “Dear Life”, a collection of short stories has dealt with her personal experiences. The story is about life on a farm, the protagonist (Alice Munro)’s growing up in Wingham, and her relationship with her parents, particularly, after her mother has fallen ill with a serious disease. The story reveals a sort of authorial confession and discloses long-hidden feelings. Of this story and some others in the collection, the author suggests that they are greatly inspired by her life experiences.
In Munro’s “Dear Life,” setting and people are very important as they constitute a great deal of her personal experiences. More particularly, much of the action of the story is set in the area in which the author has grown up.
People also play an important role in Munro’s “Dear Life,” since they shed much light on the author’s actual experiences and their manifestation in her short story. Munro’s relationship with her parents in particular is greatly reflected in the protagonist. The following lines demonstrate the similarity between the business of the author’s business and that of the narrator of “Dear Life”:
“The truth was that my father had got into the fur business just a little too late. The success he’d hoped for would have been more likely back in the mid-twenties when furs were newly popular and people had money.”
The author’s father and that of the narrator also share the same declining experience of their business.
Munro’s mother has made several appearances in her short stories, which demonstrates the author’s difficult relationship with her mother and exhibits the autobiographical component of “Dear Life.”
A further autobiographical component of “Dear Life” figures most clearly in the narrator’s account of her marriage and subsequent inability to see her mother during her last illness or attend her funeral rites. The narrator, or rather the author, expresses her regret about her failure to see her mother for the last time:
“I did not go home for my mother’s last illness or her funeral. I had two small children and nobody in Vancouver to leave them with. We could barely have afforded the trip, and my husband had contempt for formal behaviour, but why blame it on him? “
Alice Munro’s “Dear Life”, a collection of short stories has dealt with her personal experiences. The story is about life on a farm, the protagonist (Alice Munro)’s growing up in Wingham, and her relationship with her parents, particularly, after her mother has fallen ill with a serious disease. The story reveals a sort of authorial confession and discloses long-hidden feelings. Of this story and some others in the collection, the author suggests that they are greatly inspired by her life experiences.
In Munro’s “Dear Life,” setting and people are very important as they constitute a great deal of her personal experiences. More particularly, much of the action of the story is set in the area in which the author has grown up.
People also play an important role in Munro’s “Dear Life,” since they shed much light on the author’s actual experiences and their manifestation in her short story. Munro’s relationship with her parents in particular is greatly reflected in the protagonist. The following lines demonstrate the similarity between the business of the author’s business and that of the narrator of “Dear Life”:
“The truth was that my father had got into the fur business just a little too late. The success he’d hoped for would have been more likely back in the mid-twenties when furs were newly popular and people had money.”
The author’s father and that of the narrator also share the same declining experience of their business.
Munro’s mother has made several appearances in her short stories, which demonstrates the author’s difficult relationship with her mother and exhibits the autobiographical component of “Dear Life.”
A further autobiographical component of “Dear Life” figures most clearly in the narrator’s account of her marriage and subsequent inability to see her mother during her last illness or attend her funeral rites. The narrator, or rather the author, expresses her regret about her failure to see her mother for the last time:
“I did not go home for my mother’s last illness or her funeral. I had two small children and nobody in Vancouver to leave them with. We could barely have afforded the trip, and my husband had contempt for formal behaviour, but why blame it on him? “
Summary or Analysis Of Dear Life
The collection’s centrepiece is the title story, which is narrated by an unnamed woman. As the story begins, she grew up in the Ontario countryside in the 1930s. Her parents run a fur business, raising minks and other animals and selling the pelts. Because of the location of her family homestead, the narrator must attend a country school, which she does not like. Her father purchases an old shed in town; this way, he is a tax-paying property owner and can send his daughter to the town school.There, she makes friends with one of her classmates, but the narrator’s mother forbids the two girls from spending any time together. The friend’s mother was reportedly a prostitute who had died of a sexually transmitted disease. The narrator harbours a quiet grudge against her mother for denying the friendship with the other girl.
“It’s nothing to do with circumstances. Yowon’t’t believe how good it is. Accept everything and then tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens, anyway, you’re just there, going along easy in the world.”
The narrator focuses instead on schoolwork. Even though most girls of her time and environment did not complete high school, the narrator works hard to achieve this goal for herself. In between, she discovers the joy of reading and becomes a voracious consumer of books. She also helps her mother around the house.
Throughout her childhood, the narrator listens to her mother’s stories about a mean old woman in town named Mrs Netterfield—stories that are just wild enough that the narrator does not believe them. Mrs Netterfield was so cruel that she allegedly chased a deliveryman from her property with an axe because there was a mistake in her grocery order. The narrator’s mother also claims that Mrs Netterfield snuck up to her house when she was a child and peered in the windows before scurrying away.
When the fur business fails, the narrator’s father finds a job as a guard at a nearby factory. At home, the narrator starts to notice early signs of Parkinson’s disease in her mother. Over the years, the symptoms slowly but progressively worsen.
“We say of some things that they can’t be forgiven, or that we will never forgive ourselves. But we do–we do it all the time.”
When she is an adult, the narrator moves to Vancouver, where she meets her husband. She still keeps a subscription to her small hometown newspaper. While reading it one day, she comes across a poem written by Mrs. Netterfield’s daughter. This discovery inspires the narrator to seek out some old records, which show that the Netterfield family used to live in the house where the narrator grew up.
The narrator’s mother eventually dies of Parkinson’s. Since travelling to her funeral would be too costly, the narrator stays in Vancouver, but she misses her mother and wishes she could explain things to her. Having learned the truth of her Mrs. Netterfield stories, the narrator regrets not being closer to her mother.
“She would live now, not read.”
It is this seemingly little moment of discovery—the truth of her mother’s stories—that prompts the narrator to reevaluate the entirety of their relationship. Such moments thread throughout the stories in Dear Life. In “To Reach Japan,” a poet named Greta and her young daughter, Katy, take a train trip to Toronto. This simple act motivates Greta to reflect on her life and her steady marriage, eventually reaching a point in which she flirts with the idea of an extramarital affair and confronts her feelings of maternal guilt. In “Gravel,” an older woman remembers her childhood and her normal family—both of which shattered because of a tragedy at a gravel pit.
In “Train,” Jackson hops off a train somewhere in rural Ontario, where he meets Belle, a woman several years his senior. Despite the difference in age and a lack of common interests, their relationship is surprisingly normal and successful, proving that miracles need not be showy and majestic to be powerful and enduring. Even when death and long-buried secrets threaten to drive a wedge between them, Jackson and Belle understand how beautiful and profound their bond is, whether in the little moments of a shared life or on Belle’s deathbed.
Vivien, a young teacher, goes to work at a tuberculosis sanitarium, in “Amundsen,” where she falls in love for the first time in her life, with the arrogant Dr. Fox. In telling her story, Vivien focuses on the quiet moments, the brief gestures, the glances, and the words left unspoken—these are what define this experience for her.
The other short stories in Dear Life are: “Leaving Maverley,” “Haven,” “Pride,” “Corrie,” “In Sight of the Lake,” “Dolly,” “The Eye,” “Night,” and “Voices.”
Overall, in the short story, Alice Munro specializes in describing married life and sexual relationships and often incorporates her own experiences in her characters and storylines.
Conclusion
Thus, the setting and characters in “Dear Life” have autobiographical foundations. They reflect the author’s actual experiences that include her relationships with the place she has lived in and the people, her parents, in particular, she has lived and interacted with. In the collection of short stories, Dear Life, she gives a calm look at the women who are oppressed by marriage and family life in the monotonous small-town life.
