| As the winner of the Nobel Prize of literature in 2013, Alice Munro is the famous Canadian writer of short stories in the world, known as "Chekhov of Canada". She is good at describing the feeling of the self and the enlightenment of life in the ordinary daily life narrative, to explore the complexity of human nature, revealing the multiple fancy of life, making outstanding contributions to Canadian literature.Psychological realism is the distinct characteristic of Munro’s short story writing.The end art is of great significance to the understanding of Munro’s concept of life and its creative characteristics. This paper can find that most of Munro’s novel is open-ended result. The ending of the story also has a variety of situations: or the protagonist in adverse or tragic situation no confessed, the conflict between characters or the failed to solve is terminated, or the story came to an abrupt end, and so on.Therefore, this paper applies the method of comparative study, aims to investigate the themes and forms of ending types of Munro’s novels and try to trace their way to the end of social and cultural causes based on her five novels- Dance of the Happy Shades, Lives of Girls and Women, The Love of a Good Woman, Runaway and Dear life.The thesis is divided into five parts: the first part is generally introduces Munro’s life and her creation, expounds the status of Munro at home and abroad and the theoretical significance of the study and describes the characteristics of her novel’s ending. The second part is analyze the types of her novel’s ending, summarizing escape type ending, return type ending and lost type ending by reading Munro’s novel carefully. The third part is analyze the types of the novel’s ending from the form aspect, based on the Phelan’s rhetorical narrative theory, concluding the three ending forms: close-story, close-discourse ending, open-story, close-discourse ending and close-story, open-discourse ending. The fourth part is mainly analyze the causes of Munro’s open ending from Munro’s own life experience, Canada’s history and culture and the post modernist literary trends. The last part is conclusion, which further summarizes the characteristics of the open ending of Munro’s short stories, and thus evaluates the great value of Munro in the history of world literature. |
