Time And Narrative In Alice Munro’s Short Stories

Alice Munro has endeavored throughout her life to write short stories.In her short stories,time has not only structural meaning but also important thematic function.Munro is good at narrating trivial things in ordinary people?s daily life with simple and exquisite words.However,lives of characters in Munro?s short stories are seemingly quiet but full of conflicts and paradoxes.Concerning studies on Munro?s short stories,researches mainly focus on feminism and narratology.However,in Munro?s short stories,the creative use of time makes prosaic stories full of mystery.Munro explores the characters? real feelings and reveals the truth of life with the skillful manipulation of time.This thesis aims to demonstrate the relationship between time and narrative in Alice Munro?s short stories and its function to themes by analyzing linear time,psychological time and fragmentary time respectively.This thesis divides Alice Munro?s 14 collections of short stories into three periods: the first period is from 1968 to 1986;the second period is from 1990 to 2001;the third period is from 2004 to 2012.Short stories in these three different periods show the development of Munro?s creative manipulation of time: linear time dominates the short stories in the first period,psychological time in the second period and fragmentary time in the third period.The main body of this thesis consists of three chapters.Chapter 1 probes into the relationship between linear time and narrative in Alice Munro?s short stories.This chapter,taking “Boys and Girls”,“How I Met My Husband” and “The Progress of Love” as the examples,states that with linear time,plots are coherent thus easier to understand.With easy-to-understand linear time,Munro?s short stories narrate the love and kinship among the family members,women?s pursuit of happiness and the appearance and development of female consciousness in the process of growth.Chapter 2 explores the relationship between psychological time and narrative in Alice Munro?s short stories.In Munro?s second period of short story writing,she focuses on the change of characters? psychology.Through the manipulation of psychological time,Munro shows that characters? inner world is different from the outside world which could reflect the complexities of human life.“A Wilderness Station”,“The Love of a Good Woman” and “The Bear Came over the Mountain” are used as the examples to explore the complex psychology of human beings when facing life-threat and various choices.Chapter 3 demonstrates the relationship between fragmentary time and narrative in Alice Munro?s short stories.Fragmentary time breaks the coherence of short stories and makes them difficult to understand.Therefore,readers have to rearrange the plots of short stories so as to grasp the meanings.In this chapter,“Tricks”,“Face” and “Dear Life” are being discussed to indicate that life is composed of trivial things rather than great events.This thesis analyzes linear time,psychological time and fragmentary time in Munro?s short stories so as to reflect the charm of Munro?s clam narrative.Though Munro just narrates ordinary people?s daily life in her short stories,with linear time as the reference,Munro skillfully manipulates psychological time and fragmentary time so as to combine characters? past,present and future together which reflects the complexities of ordinary life.In addition,mysterious open endings of Munro?s short stories tend to lead readers to reorganize the plots of short stories in order to achieve new understanding.