SOURCE: Sturgess, Charlotte. “The Art of the Narrator in Mavis Gallant's Short Stories.” Etudes Canadiennes/Canadian Studies, no. 29 (1990): 213-22.

In the following essay, Sturgess examines the role of the narrator in Gallant's short stories.

Shifts in focus a certain vocal polyphony, a narration working through fragmentary accumulation, are ways in which contemporary Canadian stories work to revise their national story. Through displacement they seek to find a new space “within” and “without” the colonized territory. The paradox of a “source” to be found at once at the centre of, and in rupture with the heritage, is traced as a revision of borders, transgression of rights, an interrelation of dissonant themes. As Coral Ann Howells says of contemporary women's fiction:

Most of them look like realistic fictions registering the surface details of daily life, yet the conventions of realism are frequently disrupted by shifts into fantasy or moments of...