Life After Life: Survival in the (Late) Fiction of Alice Munro

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

“…This connects short fiction narratives with the inner world and personal experience of writers, and, in this sense, no Munro reader can fail to notice how prominently the death of children features in her work. Although critics have analysed this theme in some of her stories (Bigot 2017;Heble 1994;Morgenstern 2018;Omhovère 2018;Sutherland 2018;Warwick 2018), and much research has been conducted to establish patterns of motifs in her work (Carscallen 1993;DeFalco 2018;Howells 1998Howells , 2009Martin 1987;Thacker 1998Thacker , 1999, my intentions are to approach the death of children in Munro's literature from the standpoint of her biography and discern recurrent elements that combine in the narrative to provide variations, and to ultimately support the much discussed autobiographical aspect of her writing (Howells 1998;Howells 2016;Palusci 2017;Redekop 1992;Ross 2020;Thacker 1988). In this regard, the Maitland River of Munro's childhood and youth is an endless source of life and inspiration that endows her narrative with mystery and adventure -as admitted by the author herself (quoted in Thacker 2018) -but remains a double-edged sword that feeds but drowns the surrounding fields and towns.…”