Meneseteung Essay | Critical Essay #1

Meneseteung Critical Essay #1

Poquette has a bachelor's degree in English and specializes in writing about literature. In the following essay, Poquette discusses Munro's use of external elements to enhance the narrative impact of "Meneseteung."

When one first reads "Meneseteung," it may seem as if Munro is as delirious as Almeda Roth, the nineteenth-century woman and main character in the narrator's story who succumbs to the blissful escapism of drugs by the end of the tale. Munro seems to indulge her every whim in the story, merging back and forth between two radically different time periods, including a narrator that calls into question the very authenticity of her own tale, and, most noticeably, inserting bits and pieces of historical information into the narrative, such as newspaper accounts and photographs. As Carol Shields says in the London Review of Books, "Munro has gone a long way toward reshaping the short story for her purposes,...
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