This is Water and Alice Munro Short Stories

Alice Munro’s short stories are usually about women and families from a suburban and or rural setting. She discusses topics such as gender roles and interpersonal relationships, usually from a woman’s perspective. What David Foster Wallace’s theory on education can do with this, is that it allows us, the reader, to adjust our perspective, to be sympathetic to the characters. Although I personally am not a girl growing up in a post-WWII Canadian small town, I can still relate to or at least empathise with the characters and their emotions that Munro has created. In Munro’s stories, her characters tend to have personal flaws or defy the tradition character ideals, for example the narrator in “Boys and Girls”, despite her desire to keep her role helping her father and dislike of the role women are designated for in her family, she ends up subconsciously transforming, until she starts to fit the mould of what her family and society says a woman should be. While we, the audience, may expect an iron-willed personality that never gives in to what society demands of them, Munro has created a believable character that the audience can sympathise with. We can use Wallace’s ideas about education to relate to and sympathise with that character about the idea of having a conflict between our dreams and what society or our family wants, for example.

          

  Munro’s work can also delve into sensitive subjects, such as corporal punishment and to an extent ‘mob justice’. In “Royal Beatings” there are two beatings discussed, one of the main character, a young girl named Rose, and the beating and later murder of a man. The man that is beaten to death in the story is a rather unsympathetic character, one accused of being abusive towards his family. He is beaten by a group of men in an attempt to ‘get justice’, and later dies on the way to Toronto (it is unknown but unlikely that the men had intended to outright kill him in the story). In contrast, Rose’s beating is given a lot more ‘attention to detail’, Munro describing the brutality of it. With Wallace’s teachings, we are able to sympathise and empathise with Rose.

          

  Overall, having the ability to adjust, to be conscious, and sympathetic, allows readers to relate themselves more to Munro’s characters, settings, and themes.