Carried away
Carried Away (1991/1994) is a short story by Alice Munro in which the plot spans more than 30 years and is about retrospective versions of events that were previously told as lived things.
action
The plot spans a period of over 40 years in the life of Louise and in it mainly the circumstances and events relating to four affairs and an accident at work on a machine, which caused a lot of attention. Louise is around 25 years old in 1917, where the story begins during the First World War. Towards the end of the story, in the mid-1950s, Louise is widowed and works as the senior manager of the local factory. It is largely told in chronological order, with the narrator retelling what has already been told earlier on the level of the story by one of the characters on several occasions or reminiscing in front of a character's inner eye. In the last section, a quasi-reteller appears in the narrator's tone, which explains a phase of Louise's life that would have been in fifth place in a chronological order of the sections - instead of the fifteenth here, the last section. The last sentence is about fading.
chapter
- Letters (10 pages)
- Spanish Flu (7 pages)
- Accidents (20 pages)
- Tolpuddle Martyrs (12 pages)
Interpretations
On a general level, "Carried Away" is about how society is reduced to producing and selling in the wake of war and how such a commodification is reflected in the loss of community, nature, history, ritual and family, Robert Lecker said in a 1999 contribution. “Carried Away” is tragic in that it is revealed that there is no self outside of what is narrated and no way of life outside of the constraints associated with a literary consciousness whose reading practices have been shaped to improve profit and productivity , or to increase the power of institutions geared towards economy and capital.
"Carried Away" is one of those works by Munro that deals with letters that demonstrate the vanity or falsehood or even the wickedness of their writers, according to Margaret Atwood in her twelve-page introduction to Alice Munro's Best . The title of the narrative is applied literally by a male figure to another male figure.
Carol L. Beran believes that Carried Away that history is remarkably similar to that Thomas Hardy in his work On Imaginative Woman told.
Editions and versions
The first version of the story appeared on October 21, 1991 in The New Yorker , the second version was included three years later with a length of 49 pages in Munro's short story volume Open Secrets (1994), which was published in German with the title Open Secrets (1996) has been published. In English, "Carried Away" is also the cover story of the American edition of Munro's fourth selection. This story had been republished three times before. “Carried Away” is, on a par with “ Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage ”, Munro's most frequently re-published work from the period before 2003.
The magazine version from 1991 and the book version from 1994 each consist of four chapters in 15 sections and show them in the same order, but the versions differ in some sentences. In Section 4 a sentence has been deleted (change in italics ): “One of the girls in this group was Grace Horne. She did not say anything . ”Section 8 begins:“ The piano factory , which had started out making pump organs, stretched along the west side of town, ... ”In Section 13, in the penultimate paragraph, a sentence is inserted:“ She was beginning to feel a faintly sickening, familiar agitation. She could feel that over nothing . But once it got going, telling herself that it was over nothing did no good. ”In the first fifth of section 14, the description of a visual illusion is varied from the first to the second version: Instead of“ On the ground a little way off slept a white calf, which Louisa would not accept, so she squinted at it until it stirred and roused itself and turned into a dingy dog. It trotted over and looked her for a moment ... "it later says" Behind the first row of chairs she thought she saw a sheep lying on the ground, but it turned into a dirty-white dog, which trotted over and looked at her for a moment. "In the last third of the same section, a paragraph ends differently:" 'A normal life,' she repeated - and a giddiness seemed to be taking over, a widespread forgiveness, a tender notion of understanting between hin and herself . 'What do you think I mean by that?' " Becomes:" a widerspread forgiveness of folly, alerting the skin of her spotty hand, her dry, thick fingers that lay not far from his, on the seat of the chair between them . An amorous flare-up of cells, of old intentions. 'Oh, never dies'. "
literature
- Ulrika Skübers, Clearing a Space for Sameness, Chapter 5 in: Possibility-Space and Its Imaginative Variations in Alice Munro's Short Stories , Stockholm University, 2008, ISBN 978-91-7155-770-4 , therein pp. 149-153 on Carried Away .
- Virginia D. Pruitt, Gender Relations: Alice Munro's Differently and Carried Away , in: Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic: A Journal for Mental Health Professionals , 2000 Fall; 64 (4): 494-508.
- Robert Lecker, Machines, Readers, Gardens: Alice Munro's Carried Away , in: The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro , edited by Robert Thacker, Toronto, ECW; 1999, pp. 103-127.
- Miriam Marty Clark, Allegories of Reading in Alice Munro's Carried Away , in: Contemporary Literature , 1996 Spring; 37 (1): 49-61.
- Ildikó de Papp Carrington, What's in a Title? Alice Munro's Carried Away , in: Studies in Short Fiction , 1993 Fall; 30 (4): 555-64.
Individual evidence
- ↑ "Somewhere out in the country they would lose the sound of each other's bells." (The final sentence in both versions.)
- ^ Robert Lecker, Machines, Readers, Gardens: Alice Munro's Carried Away , in: The Rest of the Story: Critical Essays on Alice Munro , edited by Robert Thacker, Toronto, ECW; 1999, pp. 103-127, pp. 103, 105.
- ↑ Margaret Atwood, Introduction , in: Alice Munro's Best. Selected Stories , Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2006, pp. Vii-xviii.
- ↑ "Far more likely he was sincere. He got a little carried away. It's all just the way it looks on the surface. "(Verbatim mention of the title of the story, beginning of chapter 2, section 5.)
- ↑ Beran, Carol L. "Thomas Hardy, Alice Munro, and the Question of Influence." The American Review of Canadian Studies . 29.2 (1999): 237-58. 9 June 2008, p. 237. Referenced in: Footnote 4 in: Joanna Luft, Boxed In: Alice Munro's Wenlock Edge and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight , in: Studies in Canadian Literature / Études en littérature canadienne (SCL / ÉLC) , Volume 35, Number 1 (2010).
- ↑ Carried Away: A Selection of Stories (New York, 2006) or Alice Munro's Best: A Selection of Stories (Toronto, 2006)
- ↑ See also the information in the table of the detailed list of short stories by Alice Munro in the English language Wikipedia