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Pif Magazine
ISSN: 1094-2726
Published by:
Pif, LLC
PMB 248
4820 Yelm Hwy SE
Suite B
Lacey, WA 98503-4903
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Endings : Page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7
But Robinson’s narrator, Ruth, opposes that process by telling us instead what Lucille is not doing, is not thinking, what she is not feeling, and in this way she offers us a vivid string of negative information, which cuts against the grain of a narrator’s usual course of conversation with her reader. As a result, we envision in sum what is not happening, and we envision it powerfully, and this striking photographic negative causes us moments of some discomfort, while it also intensifies our engagement with the scene as we attempt to accommodate the contradictory sensation of seeing and hearing and feeling perfectly what is not there.
This reverse logic of language fits and amplifies the persistent thematic curiosity of the book itself: what loss or abandonment does to the one who’s been left. Lucille can’t expel her sister, her family, from her memory and hence their physical absence creates a searing presence, one that will always be in attendance.
So there’s a certain readerly unease, an eager anxiety of sorts, created at the close of Housekeeping. He’s left feeling, not unfulfilled, but nevertheless that he still has some work to do.
Alice Munro uses a similar strategy to end her story "Fits." Its central character, Peg, has been married five years to Robert, and is the mother of two teenage sons by a first marriage. They all live in one of the small Canadian towns that Munro has claimed as her terrain. One morning she takes some eggs to her next-door neighbors and finds them in their bedroom, dead of gunshot wounds.
As the story continues, Munro incrementally builds and complicates the focus of interest, which is not the brutal shotgun deaths of the neighbors, but the great mystery of Peg’s apparently unaffected behavior in the aftermath. This rippling-out of her eerie equanimity – variously unsettling to her sons, her friend at work, and, most of all, to Robert – drives the story. Baffled by the ease of her behavior, one of her sons begins to remember his violent fantasies, when Peg and her first husband argued in front of him, that one of them was going to kill him. At the same time, Robert recalls an ugly affair with a woman before he met Peg, one that ended in a vicious argument that had him and his lover "trembling with murderous pleasure." And further on, Robert, his thinking infected by Peg’s bemusing muteness, realizes that he hadn’t thought to ask Peg about her "violent first marriage . . . til now."
The disconcertment in everyone whose life orbits around Peg grows to the story’s masterful ending, with its startling revelation: that Peg had not been surprised by the bloody scene. She had known what she was walking into, and chose to, nevertheless.
Just as Ruth, in Housekeeping, tells us what her sister did not see and did not feel, so does Munro’s narrator disperse the impact of the final moment without diluting it in the least. Notice especially the last paragraph, with its similar rhetorical strategy:
At noon, when the constable in the diner was giving his account, he had described how the force of the shot threw Walter Weeble backward. "It blasted him partways out of the room. His head was laying out in the hall. What was left of it was laying out in the hall."
Not a leg. Not the indicative leg, whole and decent in its trousers, the shod foot. That was not what anybody turning at the top of the stairs would see and would have to step over, step through, in order to go into the bedroom and look at the rest of what was there. [italics mine]
Munro’s work is sui generis and, as example of this, the closing of "Fits" – forgive the wordplay – doesn’t neatly fit. Rather, it almost exactly straddles the line between summation and partiality. For though we do have a sense at the end that we’ve been given all the information – and so, from one standpoint feel the telling is complete – we’re simultaneously left with the magnificent enigma of Peg’s behavior and its effect on her husband in their future life together, a future whose specific nature we can’t – and aren’t meant to – know at the point where Munro ends her story; or ends it, at least, insofar as there are no more words on the page.
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