In fact, in few Munro stories is the narrative frame itself without suspicion. This has been especially true in her later collections, in the quasi-fictional stories of Dear Life, for example, where the narrator is never sure if what she’s remembering is true or not. But it came up earlier, as early as “The Ottawa Valley,” a story about the protagonist’s journey with her mother to her childhood home. Throughout the story the mother is herself slightly out of frame, eclipsed by her sister. And at the very last second the narrator breaks the fourth wall. “If I had been making a proper story out of this,” she says, she would end it a certain way. And then the real admission pours forth:
The
problem, the only problem, is my mother. And she is the one of course
that I am trying to get; it is to reach her that this whole journey has
been undertaken. With what purpose? To mark her off, to describe, to
illumine, to celebrate, to get rid of her; and it did not work, for she
looms too close, just as she always did. She is heavy as always, she
weighs everything down, and yet she is indistinct, her edges melt and
flow.
- "Resisting Rhapsody: The Year of Alice Munro"