‘The great unhappiness of another’: Writers and readers in three stories by Alice Munro

Abstract

Three Alice Munro stories – ‘Material’, ‘Family Furnishings’ and ‘Fiction’ – feature readers who react to fiction based on material from their own lives. ‘Fiction’ is alone in this group as the story in which the reader is pleased, rather than otherwise, with the story she reads. This different reaction is traced to important aspects of the reader’s characterization. Only in ‘Fiction’ is the reader unrelated to the internal story’s author and not also a writer herself. These traits make her a reader who consistently revises her ideas about the story she reads, as well as one who can be said to resolve a persistent conflict in this small set of stories.