Fate is another of the ancient preoccupations that Munro revives in a modern
setting: the way human beings find meaning in sequences of seemingly random
events, or come to believe, retrospectively or projectively, that their
lives are following a preordained pattern. Munro’s narrative technique is
subversive of any such conviction. Her stories proceed through hiatus and
interruption. She lays down discrete blocks of narrative within each story,
like stepping stones, requiring her reader to jump trustingly from one to
another, until some surprising destination or other has been reached. These
gaps are what account, in part, for the sense of interpretive freedom that
her texts convey: their spaciousness and openness to the unexplained or
unexplainable. The reader who is tempted to look up from one of Munro’s
stories and ask: “But where is all this going, what does it mean?” should
remember Edith doing her Latin homework at the kitchen table at the end of
“Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage”:
“Tu ne quaesieris, scire nefas, quem mihi, quem tibi – ‘You must not ask, it
is forbidden for us to know –’ She paused, chewing her pencil, then finished
off with a chill of satisfaction, ‘– what fate has in store for me, or for
you –’ ”
- Ruth Scurr, "The Darkness of Alice Munro," TLS 2011
descensus Averno facilis est