SOURCE: “Kaye Gibbons's A Virtuous Woman: A Bakhtinian/Iserian Analysis of Conspicuous Agreement,” in Southern Studies, Vol. 3, No. 2, Summer, 1992, pp. 99-115.

In the following essay, Souris uses the narrative theories of Mikhail Bakhtin and Wolfgang Iser to analyze the multiple narration of Gibbons's A Virtuous Woman.

And after it all, after it's all said and done, I'll still have to say, Bless you, Ruby. You were a fine partner, and I miss you.

—Jack Stokes

The bare story of Kaye Gibbons's A Virtuous Woman (1989) is simple enough. When we stand back from the moment-to-moment experience of this multiple-narrator novel, it settles in our memory as the story of the relationship between a man named Jack and a woman named Ruby who lived together for a quarter of a century in rural North Carolina. The novel details how they met and fulfilled each other's basic existential need for the...