I Am Not the Best of Witnesses: (Anti-)Narrative Voice in Alice Munro’s “Home”

Abstract

The New York Times recently called Canadian author Alice Munro “one of the greatest short story writers not just of our time but of any time.” Munro, who was born in Huron County in 1931, still lives in the region and has set much of her work in the area, writing with nuanced depth and accuracy that has led the publishing and literary world to affectionately refer to the region as “Alice Munro Country.” Over the course of her career, Munro has typically first published her short stories in magazine venues, such as the New Yorker, and every four or so years, collected these stories into book form. The story “Home,” first published in 1974 is a rare exception; it was originally published in a more obscure source, with Munro stating that it was “sort of a final statement” about her “dissatisfaction with art.” Yet a revised form of this story resurfaced in 2006 when it was published in Munro’s semi-autobiographical book The View from Castle Rock, a collection of stories that in a characteristically postmodern fashion, blurs the boundaries among the genres of memoir, history, and fiction. I will discuss why “Home,” and its peculiar publication history, highlight larger themes within Alice Munro’s work: her portrayals of ambivalence towards family and “home” itself; her self-consciousness with regards to writing fiction that is at the same time about places, people, and history from the “real” world; and how these anxieties have shaped her writing style over time