"Dance of the Happy Shades"

Paper Summary:

This paper chooses excerpts from stories in Munro's collection and synthesizes these together to form a complete analysis of Munro's style. It finds that by evoking feelings of the ordinary in Canadian life Munro is able to evoke an extraordinary empathy for the characters and their predicament.

From the Paper:

"The narrator and her sister both have a burden of guilt: the narrator has left her sister to shoulder the responsibility of caring for their chronically ill mother; Maddy has ultimately found it necessary to put her mother in a nursing home. The narrator states flatly at the beginning of the story that she and her sister "at heart reject each other", yet as the story unfolds, the sisters' emotional ties seem to matter as much as their opposed choices in life. Moreover, the narrator is linked to her sister, her mother and even her aunt, in that each, with greater or lesser success, has "tried to run". Images and Walker Brothers Cowboy have in common that they both deal with the "bewilderment" that is the young imagination's response to dark experiences. The narrator in both stories pledges to share her father's secret."

More papers on "Dance of the Happy Shades":

• Article Review # 111437 : "Deitrick, Bokovoy, Stern and Panik's "Dance of the Call Bells"
• Analytical Essay # 130462 : "Tip of the Tongue Phenomenon"
• Film Review # 96878 : "Review of "The Red Shoes"

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