“a washing away, a vanishing”: living with and...
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Master of Arts – Integrated Studies
“A WASHING AWAY, A VANISHING”:
LIVING WITH AND DYING FROM CANCER
IN THE SHORT FICTION OF ALICE MUNRO
By
JENNIFER JANE BETTIOL
Integrated Studies Project
submitted to Dr. Jolene Armstrong
in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of
Master of Arts – Integrated Studies
Athabasca, Alberta
June 2016
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Table of Contents
Abstract 2
Acknowledgements 3
Dedication 4
Body of Paper 5
Bibliography 27
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Abstract
While twenty-three of Alice Munro’s short stories mention cancer, this disease is an
important theme in the ten stories that form the basis of this paper. Munro admits that her fiction
is often based on autobiography. As Munro has aged, her stories have increasingly focused on
illness and dying. Half of the ten cancer stories considered in this paper were published after
Munro’s 1993 cancer scare, while three of these tales were published after she had cancer around
2009. The ten stories reviewed for this paper reflect Munro’s overarching literary style. While
seemingly realistic on the surface, these multi-layered tales are often ambiguous, open to
interpretation, elusive, and lacking in closure. However, in her portrayal of the effect of cancer
on patients and on their families, Munro puts aside much of her customary ambiguity, and
depicts the emotional journey of the terminally-ill – such as their wavering will to live,
contemplation of suicide, need for reconciliation, and ultimate acceptance of death – as well as
the inadmissible thoughts of family members and friends in an honest and persuasive manner.
Due to Munro’s masterful understanding of human psychology and her careful use of narrative
viewpoint, her depiction of the emotional effect of the cancer is consistent with medical and
psychological research and with the experiences of my family and friends who have had cancer.
Whether writing about her own encounters with cancer or from her creative imagination, Munro
grasps the emotional effects of cancer on the patient and on the patient’s family and
acquaintances.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks to my wonderful professors in the MAIS program, Drs. Cornelia Burian, Carolyn
Greene, Gregory Johnson, Lisa Micheelsen, Josipa Petrunic, Joseph Pivato, Lynda Ross, and
Veronica Thompson. I am especially grateful for Dr. Jolene Armstrong’s kind guidance with this
project.
Many thanks to my online “study buddy,” Tori MacLean, my friends, my sisters, Liz,
Casey, Gillian, and Margot Ready, and my sons, David and Michael, for your encouragement
and support during my three years in this program. Jiro and Abby, you are the best “study dog”
and “study cat” ever.
Special thanks to my husband, Dennis, who, after seeing me through my Chartered
Accountancy exams more than three decades ago, suddenly had to endure living with a student
again. Thanks for delivering all the cups of tea and glasses of wine to my desk, and for making
so many delicious meals. Most of all, many thanks for your unfailing support and
encouragement.
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Dedication
This paper is dedicated to the memory of my parents, Nancy Jane Grant Ready and
Charles Bennett Ready, who instilled in me a love of reading and a desire to learn at an early
age, and to my dear friend, Anastasia (Tessy) Perri, who recently passed away.
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After reading fourteen volumes of Alice Munro’s collected works last summer, I was
transfixed by her talent to craft captivating short fiction. However, I also felt emotionally raw
and almost depressed, for Munro’s writing “is often intensely uncomfortable to read”
(Carrington 5). Part of this discomfort comes from the “underlying sadness” (Smythe “Sad” 495)
in her stories, with illness and “the inevitability of death hover[ing] over much of Munro’s
fiction” (Carrington 38). I found her stories that touch on cancer especially compelling, since
they echoed the experiences of my father, other family members, and friends who have lived
with and often died from this disease. In keeping with Munro’s reputation as “one of the
foremost writers of psychological fiction in English” (Awano 180), her depiction of the
emotional effect of cancer on patients and their families is consistent with medical and
psychological research. Known for carefully choosing the narrative point of view of her stories
(Duncan 1), Munro uses viewpoint to enhance her portrayal of a disease that has “a powerful,
deadly hold over the collective imagination” of modern society (Mitchell 11). Although Alice
Munro once admitted that “all her writing was ‘in essence autobiographical’ ” (Alice Munro qtd.
in Sheila Munro 38), her cancer scare occurred in 1993 (Thacker Writing 473) and her cancer
battle happened within the last decade (The Globe and Mail). Therefore, in crafting her
believable portraits of living with cancer, Munro has had to draw upon her ability to “imagine[]
reality accurately” (Kent Thompson qtd. in Sheila Munro 38), especially in her earlier fiction.
The stories on cancer reviewed for this paper are representative of Munro’s overarching literary
style. They are often open to interpretation (Michael Ravitch qtd. in Blin 46), full of “paradoxes”
(W. R. Martin qtd. in Nunes 14), replete with “cryptically expressed reality” (Duncan 18), and
lacking in “closure” (Heller). However, in her portrayal of the effect of cancer on patients, their
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families, and their acquaintances, Munro puts aside much of her customary elusiveness, and
depicts their emotional journey in a persuasive manner.
Munro’s twelve original collections of short fiction1 and her two “ ‘open-form’ novels”
(Carrington 3)2 contain 148 stories3 in total. Since her fiction is characteristically multi-layered,
with at least one “story-within-the-story” (Smythe “Sad” 503), a Munro tale rarely has just one
theme. Since many Munro stories have multiple instances of illness, dying, and death, the
following thematic analysis is based on selecting cancer as the theme in any story where it is
mentioned. For example, although “Free Radicals” contains a heart attack death, a triple murder,
a car-accident death, and a patient with terminal cancer, it has been classified as a story where
“cancer is mentioned.”
Story Theme
Number of
Stories
Does not mention death or aging 44
Deaths only from murder or suicide 10
Comments on aging without reference to death 6
Includes death from natural causes (other than cancer), or accidental
death, or terminal illness without death 65
Cancer is mentioned 23
Total number of stories 148
1Dance of the Happy Shades, Dear Life, Friend of My Youth, Hateship, Friendship,
Courtship, Loveship, Marriage, Love of a Good Woman, The Moons of Jupiter, Open Secrets,
The Progress of Love, Something I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You, Too Much Happiness, and
The View from Castle Rock. 2Lives of Girls and Women and Who Do You Think You Are? 3This total includes the quasi-autobiographical essays inThe View from Castle Rock.
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In some of Munro’s stories where cancer is mentioned, it is merely noted in passing. Therefore,
the analysis of Munro’s depiction of living with and dying from cancer in this paper will be
based on ten stories where cancer is a fairly important theme (“Child’s Play,” “Day of the
Butterfly,” “Floating Bridge,” “Free Radicals,” “Goodness and Mercy,” “Half a Grapefruit,”
“Oranges and Apples,” “Princess Ida,” “Some Women,” and “Train”). Occasional references
will also be made to three additional stories where cancer is mentioned (“Friend of My Youth,”
“In Sight of the Lake,” and “Night”) and to the autobiographical story, “What Do You Want to
Know For?”
Munro is acclaimed for the seeming realism of her stories. Magdalene Redekop suggests
that, after reading a Munro tale, a reader will think, “Aha . . . she’s got it just right . . .” (Mothers
3). However, Karen Smythe cautions that “what seems to be reality on the surface of Munro’s
texts is not necessarily real” (“Sad” 496). Is Munro’s fictive portrayal of the experience of living
with and dying from cancer lifelike . . . or is it just superficially realistic?
Like Munro’s complex and multi-layered fiction, cancer is a multi-faceted illness, since
“cancer” is an “umbrella term for about 200 different diseases all triggered by a rapaciously
cloning cell” (Mitchell 71). Cancer is “more feared than heart disease” since dying from heart
disease “can be instantaneous, an easy death” (Susan Sontag qtd. in Vrinten and Wardle 173)4.
Better cancer treatments (Vrinten and Wardle 172) have led to a “prolongation of life in the face
of death” (Nissim et al. 361), as well as to “long and protracted” deaths from the disease (Vrinten
4 However, Vrinten and Wardle report that 40% of the participants in their survey of middle-
aged and older adults felt that “cancer could be ‘the best way to die’ ” (176; emphasis removed)
since it gives the person time to prepare for death (173).
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and Wardle 172). It is not surprising, therefore, that a study in the UK in 2005 found that the fear
of cancer has not declined (Mitchell 12). As Munro points out in “Night,” even the word cancer
has alarming connotations, making “you think of some dark rotting ill-smelling creature that you
would not look at even while you kicked it out of the way” (273). In “Train,” Belle is so
frightened of a potential cancer diagnosis that she has to be “persuaded to pay attention to” (190)
a suspicious lump in her breast. Belle may be afraid of more than impending death. She may fear
how cancer will change her life.
Life is never the same after a cancer diagnosis. Even a non-life-threatening cancer
diagnosis – such as the one that a member of my family received seven years ago – is incredibly
disturbing, and may leave the patient (and family) feeling vulnerable and unsafe (Willig 417). As
Alanna Mitchell observes, a cancer diagnosis “is the doorway into another life, an unsure one
where the things you thought you could control are suddenly running amok” (145). The
complexities of “coming to terms” with cancer, as well as with the possibility of “living-with-
dying” (Willig 417), are well portrayed in Munro’s fiction. Things that previously seemed
important may seem trivial once cancer is diagnosed. Munro depicts this in “Floating Bridge,”
when the terminally-ill Jinny “knew now that there comes a time when ugly and beautiful serve
pretty much the same purpose, where anything you look at is just a peg to hang the unruly
sensations of your body on, and the bits and pieces of your mind” (52-53). In “Free Radicals,”
Munro suggests that cancer has existentially changed Nita. Once an avid booklover, she can no
longer read. While Nita “had thought the change was temporary and the magic would reappear
once she was off certain drugs and exhausting treatments,” the narrator adds, “Apparently not”
(106; my emphasis). A cancer diagnosis is the start of a life filled with medical appointments.
Belle, in “Train,” complains about this. “Since the health insurance for everybody had come in,
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she said, nobody did anything but run to the doctor, and make their lives into one long drama of
hospitals and operations, which did nothing but prolong the period of being a nuisance at the end
of life” (190). Since most cancer treatment is now done on an outpatient basis (S. Kaufman
paraphrased in Nissim et al. 362), often in multiple locations (Nissim et al. 369), getting to
medical appointments can be complicated. The country-dwelling narrator in “In Sight of the
Lake” complains, “Your CAT scan is in one town and your cancer person is in another,
pulmonary problems in a third and so on” (218). Munro’s fiction shows insight into both the
existential and quotidian challenges that come bundled together with a cancer diagnosis.
As the “third leading cause of death” worldwide (World Health Organization qtd. in
Nissim et al. 361), cancer is a common illness. Nevertheless, cancer once carried a stigma;
people did not talk about the disease. In the early 1960s, my mother was told not to tell anyone
that her father had died from cancer. Munro’s work recalls this denial of cancer in “Friend of My
Youth,” a story set in the early part of the twentieth century. “ ‘My sister has a growth,’ Flora
said. Nobody then spoke of cancer” (7). The stigma of cancer is also apparent in “Half a
Grapefruit” (“Grapefruit”), set around the 1940s, when Rose is talking with her stepmother’s
cousin, about her father’s illness. Billy Pope says,
‘They’ll fix him up. . . . They got the good doctors.’
. . . . [Rose] hated that too, the way people hinted at things and then
withdrew, that slyness. Death and sex were what they did that about.
‘They’ll fix him and get him back by spring.’
‘Not if he has lung cancer,’ Rose said firmly. She had never said that
before and certainly Flo [her stepmother] had not said it.
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Billy Pope looked as miserable and ashamed for her as if she had said
something very dirty (53).
In addition to the taboo about discussing cancer outside of the immediate family circle, I recall
the time when close family members were not candid with the patient, to shield him or her from
uncomfortable truths. Munro portrays this in “Train,” when Belle is about to have a breast cancer
biopsy. Jackson tells her, “ ‘You’ll feel a lot better when you wake up after the operation.’
Though from everything that he had heard that was a whopping lie” (193-194). Medical
professionals were not honest with critically-ill patients, either (Byock 10). Although the narrator
in “Night” is told that the doctor has removed a “growth . . . the size of a turkey’s egg” (272),
neither her mother nor her doctor discuss the possible implications of the tumour with her.
The thought of cancer never entered my head and [my mother] never mentioned
it. I don’t think there could be such a revelation today without some kind of
question, some probing about whether it was cancer or not. Cancerous or benign –
we would want to know at once. The only way I can explain our failure to speak
of it was that there must have been a cloud around that word like the cloud around
the mention of sex (273).
Even if cancer is no longer an unmentionable disease, Alanna Mitchell reports that recent studies
find that cancer can still carry a stigma (11). Mitchell believes that messages about cancer
prevention – such as the report that approximately one-third of terminal cancers are caused by
diet and behavioral choices (World Health Organization) – makes those ill with “preventable”
cancers appear culpable for their disease (17). In “Princess Ida,” Munro shows that there was
prejudice against those who had a “preventable” cancer even in the first half of the twentieth
century. Ada says of her brother, who is dying from cancer, “ ‘Maybe with less eating he would
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have lived to be old’ ” (85). The notion of “guilt” about a cancer diagnosis is also reflected in
“Goodness and Mercy” (“Goodness”) when Bugs, complaining of her coughing fits, laments,
“ ‘Just little spasms. I’ve been figuring out – what are they punishment for. Seeing I never
smoked. I thought maybe – singing in church and not believing? But no. I think – Sound of
Music. Maria. God hates it’ ” (148). Munro depicts that it was not always “polite” to discuss
cancer and that having cancer can (still) carry a stigma.
Patients with advanced cancer prefer conservative estimates of their life expectancy in
order to shield themselves “from unexpected disappointments” (Nissim et al. 374). Munro
recognizes that encouraging medical reports can actually cause more distress than joy if the
overall prognosis is still grim. When Jinny, in “Floating Bridge,” finds out that her tumour has
unexpectedly shrunk (67), she is overwhelmed by the prospect of additional cancer treatments
without any guarantee of success. “It was too much. . . . [It] made everything harder. It made her
have to go back and start this year all over again. It removed a certain low-grade freedom. A
dull, protecting membrane that she had not even known was there had been pulled away and left
her raw” (68).
Living-in-the-moment is important to terminally-ill cancer patients (Nissim et al. 372).
Munro portrays this in “Goodness,” where the dying Bugs still wants to participate in daily life.
She rests all day in a futile attempt to attend a party (151-152). On the other hand, living with a
potentially-terminal illness can trigger clinical depression and anxiety (Willig 417), which may
cause a cancer patient to retreat from interacting with others. Munro may be portraying a cancer-
related withdrawal from daily life in “Floating Bridge,” for terminally-ill Jinny seems anxious
and depressed. She wants to go back to her home (60), she does not want to socialize with
Helen’s family (63), and she wants to be alone (63). But, as Monika Lee cautions, in Munro’s
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work, “[a]s in life, the great bulk of human motivation and influence is wordless” (102). There
are always alternative interpretations of a character’s actions in Munro’s fiction. Instead of
depression, Jinny’s withdrawal may be due to a feeling of social-superiority over Helen’s family,
as her husband Neal hints (63), or her dejection may be (partially) caused by Neal’s domineering
style (Howells 181). Munro weaves a similar veil of uncertainty over Mr. Crozier, the
terminally-ill young man in “Some Women,” who may be suffering from cancer-related
depression. His wife describes him as “irritable” (151), while the narrator describes his “usual
weariness” (149). On the other hand, Mr. Crozier may just be bored, alone in a room with his
books (145) and not much else. He may resent and dislike his wife, for he is certainly cheerful
when Roxanne shows up (149). While these two stories suggest that these cancer patients may be
depressed, Munro leaves the actual cause of their unhappiness open to multiple interpretations.
A strong will to live is “a natural instinct of all living creatures” (Carmel 949). However,
Chochinov et al. report that as elderly cancer patients in palliative care approach their death, their
“will to live is highly unstable” (818), varying with “depression, anxiety, shortness of breath, and
sense of well-being” (816). Munro’s stories display this volatility in the will to live in terminal
cancer patients. Dying Bugs, in “Goodness,” only wants to live long enough to cross the
Atlantic. “ ‘Now I’ve got to make it to the white cliffs of Dover. . . . Else it’s over the side and
feed the fishes’ ” (139). Lynn Blin observes that there is a “plethora of negative structures, or
terms with a negative connotation” (51) at the beginning of “Free Radicals.” This may suggest
that Nita, the terminally-ill cancer patient whose husband has just died from a heart attack (101),
has lost her will to live. However, Nita rediscovers her desire to live when a mass-murderer
invades her home. Munro writes that Nita “was frightened. Certainly. The fact of her cancer was
not going to be any help to her at the present moment, none at all. The fact that she was going to
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die within a year refused to cancel out the fact that she might die now” (114). While Nita
rediscovers her will to live in “Free Radicals,” Jinny, in “Floating Bridge,” seems to have lost
hers, for the narrator writes, “The cemetery didn’t bother her. She realized it didn’t matter” (55).
Of course, in typical Munro fashion, there is another interpretation of Jinny’s death wish.
Unhappily married (Kulyk Keefer xiii) to the overbearing Neal, Jinny is trapped in a sort of
living-death. In “Free Radicals” and in “Floating Bridge,” Munro demonstrates that the will to
live is complex and that it is dependent on emotional and physical factors.
At some point, the terminally-ill must face the inevitability of death. Nissim et al. report
that those dying from cancer wish to control how they pass away (376) and that some may
consider suicide (369). However, “rather than representing a literal suicidal intention, the idea of
being able to control the exit from life actually makes living with cancer more tolerable” with the
terminally-ill “preserv[ing] the option of suicide for more difficult times in the future” (372). In
“Some Women,” Munro suggests that suicide is an option to the terminally-ill. When Mr.
Crozier has the narrator lock his bedroom door, Roxanne worries (groundlessly) that he is
committing suicide (161).
During the year my father was living-with-dying from lymphoma, he was busy
organizing his affairs and visiting with friends and family. This desire to put one’s “affairs in
order before dying” was common among the patients with advanced cancer in Nissim et al.’s
study (375). When dying Mr. Crozier in “Some Women” locks Roxanne out of his sick room
(159), he seems to be “organizing his affairs” by appeasing Sylvia, his jealous wife. As the
narrator relates, “I understood pretty well the winning and the losing that had taken place,
between Sylvia and Roxanne, but it was strange to think of the almost obliterated prize, Mr.
Crozier – and to think that he could have had the will to make a decision, even to deprive
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himself, so late in his life” (163). However, some patients need to do more than visit with loved-
ones and organize their finances as their death approaches. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross reports that the
terminally-ill who were “guilt-ridden about some real or imagined ‘sins’ . . . were greatly
relieved when we offered them an opportunity to share them, especially in the presence of a
chaplain. These patients all felt better after ‘confessions’ or arrangements for the care of others
and usually died after the unfinished business was taken care of” (270). Munro’s fiction portrays
the cathartic effect of sick-bed confessions and reconciliations, whether death is imminent or not.
While in the hospital for a breast cancer biopsy, Belle unburdens herself about the circumstances
of her father’s death, telling Jackson that he committed suicide (“Train” 197) after ogling her
naked body (196). After her revelation, Belle feels relieved, and she observes, “ ‘You realize I
am in an abnormal state. I know I am. Everything is clear. I am so grateful for it’ ” (198). Munro
realistically shows that some attempts at reconciliation and redemption by the dying are not
successful. In “Child’s Play,” dying Charlene leaves a letter for her childhood friend, Marlene,
requesting her to bring a priest to the hospital. Charlene wants to be absolved of murdering the
mentally-challenged Verna – with Marlene’s help – at summer camp many years ago (Narduzzi
84-85). Munro leaves it uncertain if Marlene ultimately fulfills Charlene’s dying wish (192). In
“Princess Ida,” Ada’s brother Bill – once “the terrible fat boy, so gifted in cruelty, so cunning,
quick, fiendish, so much to be feared” (83), who had “tormented” and “tortured” Ada when she
was young (73) – visits his sister when he is dying of cancer. Ada’s daughter, Del, wants to
know if her mother still hates Uncle Bill? “ ‘Of course I don’t hate him,’ said my mother quickly
and with reserve” (84). Munro’s construction of Ada’s response shows that “[t]here will be no
moment of reconciliation between brother and sister. If the brother has forgotten, or forgiven
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himself, his sister’s resentment remains intact, and non-negotiable” (Murray para. 31). The dying
are not always granted their wish in Munro’s fiction.
Until the middle of the last century, cancer patients generally died fairly soon after their
diagnosis, whether they received treatment, or not (Mitchell 42). In “Friend,” set in the early part
of the twentieth century, Munro writes that “a nurse had arrived [to care for the terminally-ill
Ellie]. That was the way things were done then. People died at home, and a nurse came in to
manage it” (12). Set sometime before the middle of the twentieth century, “Some Women” also
comments about the lack of effective cancer treatments, noting that at that time “there was
nothing much to be done about things like . . . leukemia. . . . people with leukemia went to bed,
and after some weeks’ or months’ decline in a tragic atmosphere, they died” (143). Belle, in
“Train,” lives for about three years after her breast cancer was diagnosed in 1962 (189, 203), and
the narrator comments that Belle “had lasted maybe longer than you might have expected” (203).
Improvements in the life expectancy of cancer patients (Nissim et al. 361) are depicted by Munro
in two stories set in the early twenty-first century. In “Floating Bridge,” Jinny’s tumour has
shrunk “significant[ly]” (67), while in “Free Radicals,” Nita is “in remission – whatever that
really meant” (102). Munro is careful to portray the (in)effectiveness of cancer treatment in
relation to the time in which she sets a story.
Elisabeth Kübler-Ross notes that when the end comes, most people “die in the stage of
acceptance, an existence without fear and despair” (130). This was certainly the case for the
cancer patients that I have visited in their final days. It seems that Rose’s father in “Grapefruit”
has accepted the inexorability of his death, too, as he sits waiting to go to the hospital. “His shed
was locked, his books would not be opened again, by him, and tomorrow was the last day he
would wear shoes. . . . [Rose] believed he was prepared for Westminster Hospital. . . . And for
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what followed” (58). However, the endings of “Floating Bridge” and “Free Radicals” leave it
unclear what life – or death – holds for terminally-ill Jinny and Nita. Furthermore, while Bugs in
“Goodness” (158), Mr. Crozier in “Some Women” (163), and Belle in “Train” (203) all die
during their respective tales, no details of their deaths are narrated5. Munro’s penchant for
“indeterminate ending[s]” in her stories (Howells 190) means that the reader is often not privy to
the “endings” – the deaths – of many of the dying characters in her fiction.
One way in which Munro fashions multiple layers of truth in her fiction is through her
careful selection of narrative point of view (Duncan 1). Munro’s narrators6 certainly play an
important role in her portrayal of living with and dying from cancer. Of the ten stories reviewed
in detail for this paper, four have female first-person narrators (“Day of the Butterfly”
(“Butterfly”), “Child’s Play,” “Princess Ida,” and “Some Women”). In each of these stories, the
narrator “stands uneasily between two positions” (Pfaus 7), recounting childhood experiences –
with the aid of Munro’s nearly-perfect comprehension of “the world of the child” (Saturday
5 Munro’s non-portrayal of “death scenes” is consistent with Flora de Giovanni’s
contention that, in modernist short fiction, death generally occurs outside of the narration (71-
76).
6 Heble observes that some of Munro’s narrators “find themselves believing in the stories they
have constructed about their pasts – accepting these constructed pasts as real and true – even
though they recognize that their perception of the past does not correspond with what actually
happened” (6). Therefore, given Munro’s proclivity for multiple levels of reality, any of Munro’s
first-person (and even third-person) narrators discussed in this paper might be considered
unreliable at some level.
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Night qtd. on Dance of the Happy Shades back cover) – while adding commentary from “the
more reflective remembering point of view of the adult” (Murray para.7). The use of divided
narration (Martin 39) in “Princess Ida” allows Munro to demonstrate the often unclear – or even
confused – ideas that young children have about life and death. Del, the narrator, recounts her
misunderstanding about her grandmother’s death from cancer, writing that she “went away for an
operation but she had large lumps in both breasts and she died, my mother always said, on the
table. On the operating table. When I was younger I used to imagine her stretched out dead on an
ordinary table among the teacups and ketchup and jam” (73). While Del is unconcerned about
“catching” cancer from contact with her uncle, she is worried about death. “I looked at the chair
where he had sat. I had a fear of contamination, not of cancer but of death itself” (85). The
unnamed young narrator in “Some Women” is also unconcerned about infection from cancer.
While her grandmother has cautioned her “not [to] touch anything the patient had touched,
because of germs,” her mother has refuted the grandmother’s claim (145). Like Del in “Princess
Ida,” the narrator in “Some Women” displays a young person’s increasing awareness of her own
mortality:
Mr. Crozier looked terrible. A tall man whose ribs had shown like those of
somebody fresh from a famine . . . whose head was bald and whose skin looked as
if it had the texture of a plucked chicken’s, his neck corded like an old man’s.
Whenever I had waited on him in any way I had avoided looking at him. And this
was not really because he was sick and ugly. It was because he was dying. . . . I
was aware of an atmosphere of death in the house, growing thicker as you
approached this room, and he was at the centre of it. . . (150).
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In spite of her fear of death, the narrator is still too young to understand Roxanne’s worry7 that
Mr. Crozier might kill himself behind the locked door. The narrator “believed it would be quite
absurd for a person with only a short time to live to commit suicide. It could not happen” (161).
However, this narrator also reminds the reader twice that she is no longer the young narrator. In
the first line of the story she writes that “I am amazed sometimes to think how old I am” (143),
while in last line she observes, “I grew up, and old” (163). While it is uncertain what Munro
intends by these narrative cautions (Michael Gorra qtd. in Thacker Writing 562), it is possible
that, in her old age, the narrator has come to realize that suicide may be considered by those with
late-stage cancer (Nissim et al. 369).
While the narration of “Princess Ida” and “Some Women” portrays young children’s fear
of death, the narration of “Butterfly” depicts how heartless children can be about the death of
another person. When the schoolgirls in “Butterfly” visit Myra in the hospital, dressed in their
party finery (108) for a pretend birthday party (107), they are oblivious to the probable outcome
of her leukemia (108). Helen, the young narrator, realizes that her status as a poor girl from the
country puts her at risk of being bullied, like outcast Myra (Kelly 125), and she is more worried
about catching Myra’s “social contamination” (Cummins 108) than about Myra’s illness.
“Butterfly” is also about an adult who is reconsidering her youthful actions and wanting “to
atone for not being a better friend to Myra and for leaving her alone” (Cummins 106) when she
was ill. “Butterfly” was first published in a periodical as “Good-by, Myra.” Robert Thacker
points out that in revising “Good-by, Myra” into “Butterfly,” Munro improved “the memory of
the older narrator” (“Chapter” 74), so that the adult Helen now accepts her former “treachery”
7 See discussion on page 13.
Bettiol
19
toward Myra (“Chapter” 76). While “Butterfly” shows that childish insensibility to another’s
illness can evolve into empathy in adulthood, in “Child’s Play” it less clear whether the
narrator’s juvenile disregard for the life of another child progresses into compassion for a cancer
sufferer when that narrator is an adult. Marlene reluctantly visits Charlene, her partner-in-murder
at a summer camp many years ago, when the latter is dying of cancer. At the hospital, Marlene
effectively denies Charlene’s existence, for she describes her as just “a mound of bedclothes but
no visible person. . . . No sign of Charlene” (185-186). Although Isla Duncan believes that
Marlene shows “no pity for the dying” Charlene (154), it seems unclear if the adult narrator in
“Child’s Play” has grown in compassion by adulthood. Dilia Narduzzi feels that Marlene’s
academic research, which focuses on the physically and mentally-challenged, “clearly seeks a
kind of atonement” (85) for the murder of mentally-challenged Verna. Furthermore, Marlene
observes that the past can “sprout[] up fresh, wanting attention, even wanting you to do
something about it, though it’s plain there is not on this earth a thing to be done” (164) and she
does go to Guelph in search of the priest for Charlene (187)8. Marlene’s reliability as a narrator is
certainly in question and she may not be as unfeeling about Charlene’s cancer as she professes.
Munro uses third-person narration in six of the stories analyzed in this paper
(“Floating Bridge,” “Free Radicals,” “Goodness,” “Grapefruit,” “Oranges and Apples”
(“Oranges”), and “Train”). In “Goodness,” “Grapefruit,” and “Oranges,” the narrator is
omniscient to one (or more) relative(s) of the cancer patient or potential cancer patient, which
allows the reader to be privy to a family member’s conflicted or inadmissible thoughts and
emotions about the patient’s (possible) illness. The subjective omniscience to Rose’s thoughts in
8Munro leaves it uncertain whether Marlene ultimately fulfills Charlene’s dying wish (192).
Bettiol
20
“Grapefruit” reveals that she secretly finds some “pleasure” in the spectacle of her father’s
illness, for she “dramatized her own part in it, saw herself clear-eyed and unsurprised, refusing
all deceptions, young in years but old in bitter experience of life. In such a spirit she had said
lung cancer” (53; emphasis original). Elisabeth Kübler-Ross observes that family members
sometimes demonstrate “suppressed anger” when the dying linger on (178). In “Goodness,” even
though Averill has “profound love and solicitude” for her mother, she has a secret wish that her
mother will die soon (Heller), and she “has imagined herself neglecting her terminally ill
mother's medical needs in order to expedite her death. . . (Smythe “Sad” 503). The narrator in
“Grapefruit” observes that the family appears to anticipate (and now almost desire) Rose’s
father’s death. “They were all used to this idea, and in some ways they would be more disturbed
if his death did not take place, than if it did” (58). The narration in “Oranges” allows the reader
to see Murray’s conflicted thoughts about his possibly-ill wife, Barbara. She once disappointed
Murray by her infatuation and near-affair with Victor, their mutual friend (113-121). When
Barbara arrives to tell Murray that she does not have cancer, the narrator observes, “Easily,
without guilt, in the long-married way, he cancels out the message that flashed out when he saw
her at the top of the steps: Don’t disappoint me again” (121; emphasis original). Of course, this
open-ended thought may leave the reader wondering if Murray is hoping that Barbara does have
cancer. In Munro’s fiction, inadmissible thoughts are often open to interpretation, too.
In both “Floating Bridge” and “Free Radicals,” Munro employs a third-person narrator
who is subjective to the cancer patient, giving the reader insight into Jinny’s and Nita’s complex
and shifting emotions, as previously discussed in the section on will to live9. Consistent with
9See discussion on pages 12-13.
Bettiol
21
Munro’s careful crafting of all aspects of her short fiction, her selective use of omniscience
allows her to demonstrate the complex emotions of living-with-dying with cancer as well as the
complicated sentiments of those who “love” someone who may be dying of cancer10.
Magdalene Redekop observes that unadulterated realism in literature “makes literary
critics twitchy” (Mothers 7) and she believes that Munro’s version of realism “is not realistic”
(Mothers 7), but is instead a type “of trompe-l’oeil. . . . The questions multiply as you read a
Munro story but what you question in the end is ‘reality’ itself” (Mothers 238-239). However, in
spite of Munro’s preference for constructing stories where the putative reality is open to “endless
. . . interpretation” (Michael Ravitch qtd. in Blin 46), her portrayal of the emotions of living with
and dying from cancer for patients and for their families compares favorably with the medical
and psychological research reviewed for this paper and with the cancer experiences of my family
members and friends. While there are no “universal and uniform experiences” of sickness and of
death (Nissim et al. 384), and no one work of short fiction can provide a comprehensive picture,
taken as a whole, Munro’s stories show that cancer is an emotional “roller-coaster” for the
patient and for the family (even if Munro leaves those emotions open to interpretation by the
reader).
Over time, Munro’s stories have focused increasingly on illness and dying from natural
10 Of the ten stories analysed for this paper, “Train” is the only story with an occasionally fully-
omniscient narrator, although the narration is mainly subjective to Jackson. However, the
narrative viewpoint of “Train” does not provide the reader with insight into living with and dying
from cancer, except for excerpts previously discussed on pages 10 and 15.
Bettiol
22
causes11. Most of the stories where cancer is an important theme were published in the second
half of Munro’s career. Of the ten stories that form the basis of this paper, one was published in
the 1960s, two were published in the 1970s, two were published in the 1990s, and five – half of
the stories – were published in the early twenty-first century. Furthermore, the focus of Munro’s
stories on cancer changes over time. The cancer story from the 1960s, “Butterfly,” is the only
story with a child patient. The two stories from the 1970s, “Grapefruit” and “Princess Ida,”
portray middle-aged male cancer patients. Of the seven stories published from 1990 onward,
only “Some Women” is about a male cancer patient. The other six stories published in 1990 and
after (“Child’s Play,” “Floating Bridge,” “Free Radicals,” “Goodness,” “Oranges,” and “Train”)
all concern middle-aged or older women who have cancer or who have cancer scares. Munro’s
focus on older patients is realistic, since, as people age, “the incidence of cancer rises
11 Based on the thematic analysis of Munro’s stories on page 6:
Story Theme
Average
publication date
(in a collection)
Does not mention death or aging 1984
Deaths only from murder or suicide 1988
Comments on aging without reference to death 1991
Includes death from natural causes (other than cancer), or accidental
death, or terminal illness without death 1994
Cancer is mentioned 1995
Bettiol
23
dramatically” (World Health Organization), while her focus on cancer in women is reflective of
her own gender.
Magdalene Redekop warns that “many literary critics are still wary of biography” due to
the danger of resorting to a “reductive biographical explanation” instead of examining “the
complexities of literary text” (“Afraid” 6). E. D. Blodgett, while observing that Munro’s writing
is “so persuasive in leading her readers to perceive” that her work is not fiction that she once had
to write a disclaimer, entitled “What is Real?” (155), warns that “if we do not carefully heed
Munro’s warnings we will not permit her writing to escape the limitations of the
documentary. . .” (1). However, since Alice Munro told her daughter that all her work was
essentially autobiographical in nature (Sheila Munro 38), and since she has also admitted that her
work is autobiographical in “emotion” but not in “incident” (Alice Munro qtd. in Martin 40), it
does seem appropriate to examine the biographical foundation of her comprehension of the
emotions of cancer scares and of living with cancer. Munro undoubtedly understood the fear of a
cancer diagnosis after her breast cancer scare in 1993 (Thacker Writing 473). She writes about
her feelings in the autobiographical “What Do You Want to Know For?”
There were about ten days to be put in before I could see the city doctor. I filled
the time by answering letters and cleaning up my house and going through my
files and having people to dinner. It was a surprise to me that I was busying
myself in this way instead of thinking about what you might call deep matters. I
didn’t do any serious reading or listening to music and I didn’t go into a muddled
trance as I so often do. . . . I didn’t even go out for walks by myself. . . (252).
While Munro appears to be waiting calmly for her appointment, the changes to her routine
indicate her agitation. When she encounters an unexpected two-week wait for her biopsy, Munro
Bettiol
24
writes, “But I did not complain – not after a look at some of the people in the waiting room. I am
over sixty. My death would not be a disaster. Not in comparison with the death of a young
mother, a family wage-earner, a child. It would not be an apparent disaster” (256; emphasis
original). Munro’s use of “apparent” counters her declared acceptance of her possible fate. Even
when writing about a serious personal topic, Munro cannot resist being enigmatic.
In 2009 Munro experienced the additional fear that arrives with a confirmed cancer
diagnosis,12 for she admitted that she “just had cancer” (Alice Munro qtd. in The Globe and
Mail). Her health concerns – as well as her increasing age – appear to have had an impact on her
stories. Three of the ten stories analysed for this paper (“Child’s Play,” “Free Radicals,” and
“Some Women”) are from Too Much Happiness, a collection of Munro’s stories published in
2009, near the time of her cancer. This collection of stories is so focused on aging and death, that
Michael Gorra observes that “if I had to reduce the concerns of Too Much Happiness to a single
word, it would be ‘mortality’ ” (qtd. in Thacker Writing 562). Therefore, while Munro’s more
recently-published stories on cancer may be based, to a degree, on her breast cancer scare and on
her actual cancer diagnosis, her perceptive reflections on cancer in her earlier stories are likely
derived from the experiences of family or acquaintances. However, there is little documented
history of cancer in Munro’s family. Sheila Munro’s memoir about growing up with her mother
makes no reference to cancer in the family, while Thacker’s biography of Alice Munro only
12“Night,” Munro’s story about a young girl who had a “growth . . . the size of a turkey’s egg”
(272) removed, is decidedly autobiographical in many details about her family life, leaving me to
wonder if Munro had a cancerous tumour removed when she was teenager.
Bettiol
25
mentions her maternal grandmother’s cancer13 (Writing 51). Therefore, much of Munro’s insight
into living with and dying from cancer may come from her own fertile imagination. As Robert
Thacker observes, Munro writes “lives she has both lived and imagined” (Writing 19; emphasis
added).
Alice Munro’s fiction is filled with “rich ambiguity” (Michael Ravitch qtd. in Blin 46),
“circling" narrative (Redekop Mothers x), “indeterminacy,” “multiple layering,” “and the
withdrawal of closure” (Duncan 74)14. When she writes stories that touch on cancer, she does not
dwell on physical pain and actual death. Instead, Munro focuses on the psychological effects of
this disease, such as the unalterable change in the patient’s outlook on life or the inadmissible
thoughts that a family member or an acquaintance may conceal from the patient. While still
being true to her overarching style of asking “crucial questions” about life’s trials and
tribulations, without yielding any answers (Kulyk Keefer ix), Munro is able to depict the
emotions of living with and dying from cancer realistically in comparison with the medical and
psychological sources consulted for this paper and with my recollections of the experiences of
family and friends who have had cancer. Whether from her encounters with the disease or from
13Perhaps the grandmother who dies “on the table” from breast cancer in “Princess Ida” (73) is
based on Munro’s own grandmother? See excerpt on page 17.
14The complexity and subtlety of Munro’s fiction may be why she is considered
“ ‘famously’ difficult to write about” (Toews ix). Writing about Munro does, at times, feel like
playing the childhood game “pin the tail on the donkey,” where, blindfolded and spun-around,
you try to locate an elusive target.
Bettiol
26
her imagination, Munro grasps what it is to fade away from cancer. She writes,
People will sit and watch the lake as they’d never watch a field of weaving grass
or grain. Why is that, when the motion is the same? It must be the washing away,
the wearing away, that compels them? The water all the time returning – eating,
altering, the shore.
A similar thing happens to a person dying that kind of death
[cancer]. . . . A washing away, a vanishing – one fine layer after another down to
the lighted bone (“Oranges” 120).
While so many aspects of Munro’s remarkable short fiction are deliberately inconclusive or
elusive, there is little ambiguity in her depiction of the array and nature of the emotions
experienced by cancer patients and by their families and acquaintances.
Bettiol
27
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