Introduction: The Figure of the Child

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

“…If death has always been an essential subject in literature (Dasenbrock 2021), the figure of ultimate absence, the lost child, is also recurrent in culture and throughout time as a universal haunting presence that we inevitably carry within us as trauma. The loss of innocence, of the past, and of the essence of our undisturbed identity metamorphoses into images and narratives in the form of the death of children (Froud 2017a). In literature, the memory and truth of childhood sink into the forgetfulness and nontruth of adulthood, the presence and life of the child entering the realms of absence of pure knowledge and death (Derrida 1998).…”