“Chunks of Language Caught in Her Throat”: The Problem of Other(ed) Minds in Alice Munro’s Stories of Cognitive Disability

“Honey, Where Are the Kids?”: Motifs of the Past, Water, and Photography in Munro’s Stories Featuring Dead Children

“…Disturbingly, in "Child's Play", from Too Much Happiness, preteens Marlene and Charlene drown Verna, a Down syndrome girl, at a summer camp; the shadow of Verna's murder haunts the two adult females in different ways and unites them in their individual search for reconciliation with their deed. Much has been written about the story highlighting Verna's disability and/or analysing Marlene's -the protagonist and narrator's -unfelt guilt (Darroch 2018;Duncan 2011;Sutherland 2018;Warwick 2018), yet the plot line leading to the latter's confession, the raw and graphic description of Verna's killing, is condensed in images that plague her to disclosure, "uncovering a hidden truth, conserving a vanishing past" (Sontag 2019, 59) that she is unable to fend off, as she points out at the beginning of the story (A. Munro 2010, 188-89):…”