SOURCE: "'Every Last Thing … Everlasting': Alice Munro and the Limits of Narrative," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 29, No. 4, Fall, 1992, pp. 531-41.

In the following essay, Mayberry explores "the relationship between truth and narrative, between knowing and telling" within Munro's stories and characters.

Storytelling is the central activity of the characters of Alice Munro's fiction. It is of course the principal task of Munro's narrators—those characters who organize and focalize the events and reflections constituting the short stories; and it is also the frequent activity of a large group of secondary characters whose storytelling is narrated by the chief narrators and thus recessed within the main narrative. Whether seeking or evading truth, all of these characters enlist narrative as the central weapon in their dogged and usually inconclusive struggle with the disturbances born at the intersection of their pasts and their presents. All are impelled to manage...