Thanks for the ride alice munro pdf

I put my arm around her, not much wanting to. I was wondering what was the matter. This girl lay against my arm, scornful, acquiescent, angry, inarticulate and out-of-reach. I wanted to talk to her then more than to touch her, and that was out of the question; talk was not so little a thing to her as touching. The smell, the slovenly, confiding voice — something about this life I had not known, something about these people. Even George, George is innocent.

But these others are born sly and sad and knowing. I would like to say here that I write as merely an engaged reader who is trying to think clearly about Munro, not as any kind of expert. Certainly our scholars guide us, but given work and family, most of us make do with reading primarily on our own, with only occasional opportunities to read scholarship. In fact, given the human drive for autonomy, we really enjoy, if truth be told, trying to make sense, initially, on our own. Scholarship can be helpful, but most of the time the reader must make the best of their own mind.

And, given the recent decades of literary scholarship being hi-jacked by people who make an art of obfuscation, sometimes it is hard to know where to turn for scholarship that is not a waste of time. Hence the wonderful proliferation of the book club — virtual or in person — for the clarification conversation gives.

And I enjoy making of an author my temporary Virgil — someone who can be a guide, for a while, through the vale of life. She is someone who has offered a lifetime of saying how she sees life.

As a woman, I am particularly interested in her point of view. But I like its subject, its ambition, and its dense, concise, affecting complexity — complexity involving death and birth, wealth and poverty, power plays, loss and acquisition, sadness and anger, yearning and revenge. Shakespeare manages that kind of condensation, and I think Munro aims at that.

I liked, in particular, the respect which Munro affords the unacceptable girl: her speechlessness, her sexuality, her anger, her grief, her wild drive. Having an eighteen-year-old male narrator presents both opportunity and challenge.

The challenge is for us to believe in him given that Munro is a woman. I think it works although only a man could say for sure because it is a man speaking of himself in the past tense, and therefore, we are not in a stream of consciousness; we are privy to only what he chooses to tell us, and his is a reserved voice, and he clearly chooses to tell us only an outline, and that outline has a ring of truth. Yes, I think so. As always, the boys would have lightened the task by learning anything off-color as soon as possible, and the older boys would have gone for what they thought of as the sophisticated phrases, even before the internet.

So the narrator reads true to me, although there is much more could be said about that. Late one summer, a couple of randy adolescent boys roll across the tracks so that the older can procure some fun for himself and some first real sex for the younger one.

The boy who thinks he holds all the cards turns out to be holding fewer than he thought. The girl he is using, it turns out, is using him, and the girl who has nothing, it turns out, has instead a riveting power. He understands he has happened against something he cannot contain or keep, except, perhaps, to tell it, or write about it.

But of course, Munro says this all far more obliquely than that. Lois is a sixteen-year-old girl who lives in a house with a couch on the porch and a privy out back. Lois dresses to the nines for the double date, even though she knows their likely destination: the farmhouse where the widow will sell them a little moonshine and then give them the use of her front room. What is so shocking is the way we, along with Dickie, slowly realize that Lois is the one doing the using.

Just before her assignation in a barn, she smooths out her shiny dress — her good dress. Which leads, almost inevitably, to sex, which reveals to him that:. There are some people who can go only a little way with the act of love, and some others who can go very far, who can make a greater surrender, like the mystics. Lois was one of those. There are things he wants to say, but cannot. Perhaps he wants to re-establish his position. He thinks she would understand.

It is possible that she would indeed understand it, given that once sex is done, Lois has back, once again, the very real sadness of her life. To the end Dickie and George act the boor, leaving the girls at the corner to walk themselves home. Ironically, speechless Lois has the last word. Not tongue-tied now, she. In this case, an angry, inarticulate girl uses sex as a language for her anger, and uses it, too, to enjoy herself.

Munro forces the issue upon the reader — what will become of Lois? Or just a prostitute. But the beheading also links to the wrong-headed pick-up, the head in the sand hope that Lois has in clothes, the several wrong-headed attempts at communication that Dickie makes, and the headlong sex. But the sex is important. Mothers, motherhood, and escape from mothers play a role in this story, too, and there is the suggestion that sex is the necessary second birth. What matters here is the sense of Dickie being born into something: a consciousness — one that Lois has birthed him, headlong, into.

Say Lois loved her father; say he might have been a wonderful force in her life; say he died in a terrible accident at the mill; say she was only thirteen at the time; say it was so horrible her mother cannot stop talking about it. What does a thirteen-year-old girl do with such loss? How do you comfort such a loss? I guess it was the worst accident ever took place in this town. It may be almost impossible to find comfort or find words for so much anger and loss. Solace is scarce. So if, as Dickie says, what one feels after sex is sadness, sex makes sense for Lois, being both a solace and a language for the sadness.

One must not perish; one must make sense of things, one must have comfort — money, clothes, a fur for winter — as well as the acting out. What does she know where it all may lead? Yet an earlier scene raises the question whether the encounter might leave a mark after the boys have left and left the girls behind after using them as other boys have done before them.

She bent over, pulling them one by one. Will they leave a mark? But the scene also suggests that burrs are resilient and recalcitrant weeds that cling and leave a mark when they are carelessly pried loose and discarded. The burrs could then be reinterpreted as traces, scars, intimating that something has happened which has left a mark, as the encounter has, long after the event.

The burrs as traces and the haunting cry are also a means for Munro to simultaneously suggest a return to patterns and resist closure. The story suggests that the encounter has left a mark. She had almost forgotten that there are people whole lives can be seen like this. She did not talk to many old people any more.

Most of the people she knew had lives like her own […]. This is the reason why the description of the old houses on the side of the mountain clearly evokes the description of houses in other stories that take place in Southern Ontario. This also explains why the place matters to Mary, and why she fails to find words and arguments when it comes to defend Mrs. She could try all night and never find any words to stand up to their words, which came at her now invincibly from all sides: shack, eyesore, filthy, property, value.

If we think that Mary finds something of herself and finds something of her former life when she goes to Mrs. She, who used to be able to penetrate into Mrs. Her disaffected—empty? Fullerton was old, she had dead eyes, nothing could touch her. Mary is justifying her betrayal and emotional withdrawal by deciding that Mrs. Fullerton is the one who cannot be touched by anything. The embedded story also exudes a sense of something final. By contrast, the embedded story of Mr.

Fullerton is a storyteller. Fullerton, who sold eggs. Fullerton, and to her story. The story of Mr. Fullerton came upon the scene. A few pages later, Mrs. The man keeps disappearing, creating the line of flight in the story that prevents closure and counterbalances the sense of an ending that the final lines evince.

The opening pages also suggest that stories need to be repeated in order to stay alive, which is what happens with this story. Mary smiles, asks a question, and encourages Mrs.

Fullerton to say more. Stories get richer and truer each time they are told, which underlines how necessary it is to tell these stories, in order for them to become legends. Stories never end, and are never exhausted since they get richer and truer each time they are told and changed. However, the embedded story of the man who keeps walking down the lane provides an opening, a line of flight that contradicts the sense of closure.

Works cited Bigot, Corinne and Catherine Lanone. Sunlight and Shadows, Past and Present. Paris: PUF. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, The Practice of Everyday Life.

T, translated by Steven. University of California Press. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, Munro, Alice. Dance of the Happy Shades. London: Vintage. London: Chatto and Windus. Munro, Sheila. Lives of Mothers and Daughters. Growing up with Alice Munro. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart. Rasporich, Beverly.

Dance of the Sexes. Art and Gender in the Fiction of Alice Munro. Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press. Welty, Eudora. The Golden Apples.