At home (narration)
Daheim (in the original Home 1974/2006 ) is a short story by Alice Munro in which an adult first-person narrator visits her father and his second wife. It tells of relationships between people, of images, of one's own habits then and now, and of how places change through writing about them. (Read for free on the net) the time between the first published version of 1974 and the second from 2006, is about three years greater than for Munro's work "Wood" ( "with 32 years of wood ").
action
At first, a first-person narrator is on the way to “my father and stepmother” (“I come home” are the opening words) in three different intercity buses, and she observes who else is traveling with them and how different the buses are , the view and the driving style are. When she arrives, traffic accidents are the main topic and the narrator suspects that the father is embarrassed by talk like this about Irlma, his wife. But she says immediately afterwards that she will understand later that this is probably not the case. The narrator takes a tour through the house and notices changes, both in the house and in her own habits ("I don't go ... now, ... I don't open ..."). When an ex-colleague of the father, Harry Crofton, is at lunch, the conversation turns to Joe Thoms, who would like a sack of potatoes, and the narrator asks who Peggy is, who is also mentioned. Married or not, impoverishment and a relationship of violence are then the issues. The dad says goodbye with a little joke about his age and says he'll lie down for a while. The narrator hears from Irlma that the father has not been quite himself lately and the daughter accompanies him when he brings the sack of potatoes to the neighbors who live in a trailer. The father does not want to accept any money for the potatoes. In the course of the conversation, the narrator learns, among other things, that the father doesn't care who created the world, and she realizes that he seems a bit closed. He has had a bad night with nausea and before he drives himself to the hospital the next day, Irlma and his daughter talk to each other for one morning, where Irlma tells her how she (already) had an effect on men as a young woman. Before leaving, the father shows his daughter what needs to be done for the sheep. The following is about scenes in the hospital, about the emergency doctor Dr. Parakulam and the sarcastic dialogue that a 'tomboy' nurse has with him about the lack of beds, about roommates, about getting old and how someone in bed tries to protect himself from the noise his father makes when he vomits or by means of a radio volume , in a later section when the other roommate says things he doesn't want to hear. When she comes to Irlma in the evening, the signs of aging of her dog are discussed in detail. The next time he visits the hospital, the father has little energy to talk, but wants to tell his daughter something about Irlma. The daughter puzzles and thinks that he must have said that Irlma is a remarkable woman (“a wonder”). This is an assessment that she received from Irlma in the form that the father said it would have been nice if Irlma had been his wife from the beginning. The daughter senses a conflict because Irlma tells her this and she remembers a dream about her mother that she had when she first visited their house: how she was secretly painting the floor to work on an Irlma project to be done in advance. As she has just done the work with the sheep, Irlma's niece comes up, who has visited her father in the hospital and wants to make it clear to the narrator that she can now go back to her own life. At the end of the story, the narrator looks back on "all this" and she notices that when her panic began, she was standing in the very corner of the stable where she saw a lantern, the sight of which was the first clear memory of her life is, in a very cold winter that had caused great harm to the people because the chestnuts and fruit trees froze to death.
Editions and versions
The first version of the story appeared in New Canadian Stories in 1974 (Volume 74). Munro published another version of this work 32 years later in her twelfth collection of short stories, The View From Castle Rock (2006) or online, which was translated into German with the title Why do you want to know that? (2008) was released. In the English language, the story in the 2006 version is approximately 30 pages long.
The 1974 version is divided into 4 sections, "Friday", "Saturday", "Sunday" and "Monday", each beginning with the first, third, sixth and twelfth sections. Each section ends with a passage in italics with metafictional reflections by the first-person narrator. Some of these considerations have been incorporated into the 2006 version, except for those in Section 5 and those in the first part of Section 11. The last section from 1974 consists of a dedication ("For John Metcalf , November 12, 1973") that was not adopted in 2006. In the 2006 version, only the fifteenth section is brand new, the others have been extensively reworked, for example the conversation between Harry, Irlma, the father and the narrator in the fourth section about Joe Thoms and Peggy.
literature
- Robert Thacker, Introduction , in: The Rest of the Story. Critical Essays on Alice Munro . Edited by Robert Thacker, Toronto: ECW Press, 1999, ISBN 1-55022-392-5 , pp. 1-20.
- Dennis Duffy, "A Dark Sort of Mirror": The Love of a Good Woman as Pauline Poetic, in: The rest of the story. Critical essays on Alice Munro . Edited by Robert Thacker, Toronto: ECW Press, 1999, pp. 169-190. ISBN 1-55022-392-5 , p. 171 (on metafictional aspects in Home ).
Individual evidence
- ↑ a b Alice Munro: " Home ", The Virginia Quarterly Review , Summer 2006, pp. 108-128
- ↑ See also the information in the table of the detailed list of short stories by Alice Munro in the English language Wikipedia