As is often the case with Alice Munro’s story stories, details that a reader might overlook in everyday life take on a new significance.
Take, for instance, gravel. Small chips of stone, one thinks. And, yet, gravel is actually “a loose aggregation of small water-worn or pounded stones”.
Although the pit is dry for most of the story, those small stones could have been water-worn into fragments. Certainly the event at the heart of the story involves the pit being filled with water.
“At that time we were living beside a gravel pit. Not a large one…” And, so, the story begins.
The reader is immediately aware that the narrator is looking back, on “that time”, childhood, from a later time.
And just as people from one’s childhood often appear smaller when you meet them later, as the narrator observes, it seems possible that the gravel pit was actually even smaller than it appeared “at that time”.
And, yet, the gravel pit has a significance disproportionate to its “minor” status. And the gravel itself. For even the reader is living a life comprised of smaller well-worn bits of memories and experiences that shift and settle and shift once more.
A minor gravel pit. Tragedies occur in seemingly innocuous places, whether the ground beneath is solid or shifting.
Random House, 2012
Drownings (and the risk of them) play a central role in other Munro stories as well.
In “Miles City, Montana” the narrator remembers playing in the pasture next to the waters in which a young boy drowned, playing at being “horses and riders both, screaming and neighing and bucking and waving whips of tree branches besides a little nameless river that flows into the Saugeen in southern Ontario”.
A nameless little river. A shallow pit which is, years later, filled in, a house built atop it.
But years afterwards, the narrator of “Gravel” (not clearly identified as male or female) is “waiting for the splash”, waiting for an explanation, for understanding.
As fragmented as that pit is, those pieces of stone, human memory is also incomplete. “I barely remember that life. That is, I remember some parts of it clearly, but without the links you need to form a proper picture.”
The narrator is telling this story to reassemble, to create a sort of understanding. It is an interior conversation in “Gravel”, but the narrator has previously discussed the possibilities with three others, and none of the explanations alone have been lastingly or completely satisfying.
The bulk of the difficulty in this venture rests in the years between, in all that was not discussed and in all that has been lost since.
The narrator frequently refers to subjects of conversation that were studiously avoided after what happened at the pit, to the places in which the links required to form a proper picture are missing, and to the confusion rooted in imperfect memories.
“Of course, I had not understood or even particularly noticed these changes at the time. My mother was my mother. But no doubt Caro had noticed.”
The reader is left with even more questions than the narrator, even when it comes to seemingly simple observations such as these.
There are so many changes, related to the separation between the mother and father, related to Neal (who takes up with the mother as unexpectedly as he — and she, too — had taken up a life in the theatre), related to the expectations that a child has of a mother and a father and an older sibling. (And presumably of wives and husbands and lovers.)
For the most part, the reader is left to intuit the contrast to the children’s lives as currently recalled in “that time”. The narrator is primarily concerned with the time period immediately surrounding the tragedy at the pit, but there is an adult understanding of the fact that many other factors contributed to that situation before hand, creating the situation for which others would, later, feel such intense guilt and responsibility.
“…Neal got out of the car mad and yelled that he could have run me over. That was one of the few times that I saw him act like a father.”
How does one act like a father? How does one act like a mother? How does one choose not to act like a mother or father when one does, in fact, biologically inhabit that role? How might one choose not to accept those expectations or even temporarily abandon them? And what impact might that denial have on the children who have differing expectations?
And how does happiness fit into all that?
“The thing is to be happy. No matter what. Just try that. You can. It gets to be easier and easier. It’s nothing to do with circumstances. You wouldn’t believe how good it is. Accept everything and the tragedy disappears. Or tragedy lightens anyway, and you’re just there, going along easy in the world.”
Perhaps there is some truth to that. But regardless of how lightly the narrator might tread on the earth, the surface might shift at any moment.
Entire lives are built on shifting surfaces; one can live atop a loss without understanding: indeed, without even knowing.
Note: This is part of a series of posts on Alice Munro’s stories, as I read through her work-to-date. She is one of my MRE authors and, until now, this has been a chronological reading project, but I was unable to resist inserting her most recent collection. Please feel free to check the schedule and join in, for the series, or for a single story. This story is the fourth in Dear Life, with next Wednesday reserved for “Haven” and the following Sunday for “Pride”. Wednesdays and Sundays for Alice Munro, for March and April 2013.
Buried in Print, We like how you made a detailed comment about perspective. It is interesting to see how a perspective does change the entire story, because if it was told from one of the parent’s point- of – views, we think that it would appear from the surface to put less guilt on the child. First of all, a divorce is never the child’s fault, nor is the traumatic death of Caro in her sister’s sight, but when it is told from a young child’s point- of – view, the audience wants to feel and in a way, because the child seems so desperate. Why do your think Munro decided to set this story in the child’s perspective? Do the readers feel bad? We believe that there is always a reason for why an author does something, so it could make sense to say the story was told in the child’s perspective to show the effects on her, and the pain she went through that the mother just would not understand- considering she doesn’t really parent her as she should be. If the mother told this story, we feel as though it would be completely different, because she seems to be very focused on herself and new parter, rather than the life issues she is going through, and her children.
Although Munro’s perspective in this story is significant, she has explored other perspectives in other stories. Although she does write a lot of stories from a child’s perspective (teenagers’ perspectives and young adults’ perspectives too), it seems to me that she more frequently writes from an adult daughter’s perspective or a mother’s or a wife’s perspective.
She began writing in a time when people were seriously beginning to ask questions about whether it was important for women to have full and complete lives of their own, or whether they should exist only to support their husbands and their children. Dear Life is her most recent collection, but perhaps this is still a question readers are asking. Maybe the mother in this story should not expect to have any other relationships in her life which are important, only relationships with her children. I wonder whether we, as readers, would be more or less tolerant of her perceived inattention, if she had been spending time with the children’s father, whether her choices would be viewed differently. Maybe we are meant to judge her and find her lacking as a parent. Certainly there are other stories in Munro’s oeuvre in which a mother or a wife feels the kind of guilt attributed here to the child in the story (but, then, she is now an adult). But maybe we are meant to see how inocuous this threat was, how easily nothing might have happened, but how simply unfortunate it is that this time something did happen. Something that could not be undone. How easily something like that can happen, while one is living their day-to-day life. Maybe it is simply easier to believe that it happened because someone did something, or did not do something, because it’s so much more frightening to consider that tragedy can happen despite everything having been looked after perfectly.
Though this short story is quite morbid in nature, I found a lot of comfort in the way that Munro approaches memories. I often find myself judging my own memory as I read a story where an author writes a seamless retelling of the events in the past, but Munro writes as though the Narrator is actively remembering and doesn’t concern herself with filling in the gaps. One of my favorite lines in the story, “I remember some parts of it clearly, but without the links you need to form a proper picture,” describes with shocking accuracy what is going on in my own head as I go about fishing my memories for a college essay topic.
It seems fitting that Munro’s stories in Dear Life would be preoccupied with memory and gaps, as she was much older when she was writing these stories, but even her early collections consider how reliable our memories are and are not (mostly are not), but also how powerful memory remains for us, in shaping our decisions and desires, even when we have discovered how flawed it is. There is a series of stories in Runaway in which a narrator returns to the small-town near the home in which she grew up and finds things both much the same and much changed, and also the different ways in which she fills in the gaps, creates a narrative, bridging disconnections so that things make sense, so that she can understand things differently (more comfortably, in some ways). Maybe none of us remembers anything clearly really.
A big focus of the book, especially towards the end, is how the narrator has dealt with the passing of Caro. How does a traumatic experience affect the way one copes with the aftermath of it? In the narrator’s case, she becomes more willing to accept explanations from her therapist about how the door was locked and so she was unable to get help. I find it so interesting how the narrator’s struggle with overcoming her guilt is portrayed in the story. Maybe the trauma of the experience is the reason that she can’t quite recall the events of her sister’s death clearly. She thinks that maybe the door was locked, but maybe it wasn’t. She thinks that the dog fell into the pit and that Caro was the one brave enough to try and save him, but she isn’t quite sure. These may be a conglomerate of stories told by the narrator’s parents and her therapist to ease her feeling of guilt, and she may be accepting these false accounts to temper her guilt for a little while. The truth of the day of her sister’s death may always remain clouded because she refuses to believe that she was the cause, and maybe does not want to believe that she could have done anything to save her sister. She wants to believe that nothing could have been done and move on from the event. This is how she deals with the guilt of what actually happens. Munro did such a good job depicting the narrator’s struggles with the events of that day, as anyone who has experienced a traumatic experience would.
When we meet these characters as readers, we are preoccupied with the mechanics of a scene, of trying to keep characters’ names and family positions straight, and ordering the events in our readers’ minds, which is sometimes difficult in Munro’s stories, because she approaches time and memory in a natural, organic way, spiralling back and around again, revisiting and reconsidering, forcing readers to pause a moment, here and there, to determine whether a passage was rooted in the past or in the present or in something else entirely, a flawed account lodged in memory (as unreliable a source as that is). But if we reread and revisit the story enough times, on the page or in our minds, the details and the mechanics seem to be both more important (because they seem to be very important to the narrator) but also less important (because the core of the story is what remains of that event now). Guilt is such a powerful experience. If one truly felt responsible for the death of someone else, perhaps the only way to gain some peace would be to adopt a series of possibilitites in place of what one knew to be true, even just for temporary relief. Isn’t it interesting, too, that it’s not only about the locked door, in her mind, but that she was afraid to use her voice to override the latch and remains silent instead (or that’s what she seems to remember). What a profound struggle for a writer to consider, to have remained silent when one should have used one’s voice instead.
We can only assume what is happening between children and parents. We can only assume how they are supposed to act, but when you’re a child with a wandering mother and step-boyfriend your actions are unpredictable. Like the narrator, readers don’t even know the reason as to how Caro died. The gravel pit represents the dismal abyss that is the inevitable death of human existence. My group talked about the questions that can be asked about Caro, Neal, and the narrator. We believe that Caro and Blitzee were representations of careless innocence that can only be found in young, unwatched children and curious dogs.
Even though it doesn’t really matter in terms of the outcome, we do still want to be able to have seen that scene, to understand how such a tragedy occurred. It’s interesting to imagine the gravel pit as an abyss, because it seems as though there is more of a focus on the edges – which are shallow and not threatening – someone even mentions the shoreline at the beach as being similiar. We are told that the depth drops off quickly and sharply, and I think of the rocky beaches on Lake Huron, in Alice Munro territory, and I think about whether a lake, with even more dramatically unseen and unknown depths, can be just as threatening, but the danger in this story was in something man-made and contained. I wonder, too, if Caro would be viewed as innocent if she had lived, or if her manipulation and attention-seeking would have developed into something dismal and dark.
We find it cool that you related the title “Gravel” to the very foundations of our lives. Not only do we change as people, like rocks and pebbles being smoothed and pounded into gravel, but our perception of the past changes with us. We talk about how important happiness is, as brought out by this story, but our happiness and what makes us happy will also change with us. What used to make us happy before might not make us happy now, much like how the narrator’s mothers happiness changed, despite her marriage. It makes us wonder how wrong it is for the things that make us happy to change, especially when they hold such gravity as marriage to multiple parties. Is it wrong to make a commitment that, going in, seems like your opinions of it would never change? How can we commit fully to something, knowing that we change?
It’s interesting that you’ve used some contrasting terms in thinking about the gravel image, “smoothed” and “pounded”, one passive and the other active, one graceful (or weak) and the other dramatic (or powerful). I wonder if one could find evidence of both kinds of change in the characters’ lives. I wonder and whether it’s possible for change to seem “smoothed” from outside, when someone else is looking on, but felt as “pounded” on the inside by a character feeling uncomfortable. I am reminded of one of Munro’s early stories, “The Office”, in which the main character feels compelled – from within – to write, even though she understands that this decision will be judged and criticized – from outside. And I wonder if that is part of the appeal of writing stories to begin with: that one can hold something still for a moment, for the length of time it takes to write about it – or read about it – and, in that very moment, have things static and unchanging, so there is a better chance of finally understanding.
How are parents supposed to act? Should they let their young kids play alone by a gravel pit full of water? After reading this we still didn’t understand why having sex was more important than watching your kids. You could just send your kids to school or call for a babysitter. The mother was vary oblivious. The gravel pit kept growing and growing but the mother didn’t realize so were her kids. She had forgotten they were there and growing as well, what the mother doesn’t want to see her kids grow up. They tried to get their mother’s attention but ultimately they failed. Then after Caro’s death the mother was still oblivious.
Alice Munro’s stories do encourage us to ask a lot of questions. I could just as easily ask: “How are children supposed to act? Should they ignore a parent’s warning about something that is risky, should they tell a lie just to see what happens next?” It’s also interesting that our narrator does not say that’s what the mother was doing, but a professional was “convinced” that’s what happened. But that person wasn’t there. And the child remembers many evenings when a mother, called from her bedroom with the man there, always came when she was called. We weren’t there, either, so it leaves us, too, in the position of having to imagine what the truth might be, and we bring our own experiences of the world along with us in assembling the possibilities.
Readers could learn a lot about love and marriage from the story written by Munro. One of the most important thing in our life is happiness, if our marriage is not developing in the way we expect, why don’t we end it earlier, and start a new marriage? If people choose to maintain the original one, it could turn into a disaster in the future, and not body want this. In my opinion, Munro is trying to warn us about this, this is my just comprehension. My question is why Munro would choose to write about this topic, did something inspire her before?
While I agree with a lot of what you’re saying, I feel like, if Munro was simply warning us, that she would also show us happy marriages in her fiction. But in this moment, I can’t think of any truly and simply happy marriages in her stories. There are some interviews you can watch online via the CBC Archives with Alice Munro, but she is notoriously guarded about her private life. You might enjoy the work written by her daughter Sheila Munro, which offers an eye on Munro’s family life through one of her daughter’s perspective. Maybe you could find some clues there.
Just wanted to say, really love your takes on Munro. I’ve been pushing my 21st century literature students to check them out as supplemental reading for “Dear Life.”
Thank you: that’s very kind!
Sandra, guilt is very heavy. It is possible that when Caro jumped into the gravel pit, she never actually told the narrator to get help or told her something very obscure. The narrator, young, blamed herself when in reality there was little for her to do to help. She felt so guilty she could have justified her guilt by believing that Caro called her to help, but never actually did. Referring to the idea that memory is bits and pieces, is it possible that her young memory put another made up piece into the puzzle?
It is possible, indeed! That’s one of the reasons I enjoy Alice Munro’s stories so much: they leave room for a variety of readers’ responses. And of course memory is tricky!
The gravel pit made me nervous in the beginning but then a number of other things were introduced to distract me. Caro smuggled the dog under her coat on two occasions and went back to the family home in town after school and when her father found the dog it was suggested that Blitzee found her own way there. Caro said “I did it for a trick.” The narrator didn’t question that as she explains because “nothing that the strangely powerful older child does seems out of the ordinary.” There was also the other “dog” which was at the mailbox one day which concerned the mother enough that she called the school and tried to arrange to have the driver bring Caro down the lane. Then in late winter or early spring the melted snow and rains turn the gravel pit into “a little lake”. So the scene is set.
I think your point about the narrator trying to reassemble the details of what happened is key as is the narrator’s own admission that she/he did not actually notice a number of things at the time nor did she/he understand those changes. She was five years old when the event occurred. This has also of course contributed to the guilt she carries. Ruthann wisely encourages contact with Neal who provides another perspective. The last sentence I found encouraging in that it was about Caro herself and waiting for her explanation rather than focussing on the guilt of a five year old. There will likely never be an explanation but that shifting surface you have referred to will eventually, it is to be hoped, uncover a more balanced viewpoint for the adult narrator.
If I felt any anxiety about the pit, it was gone by the time I was reading about the Blitzee. Just another story about family unhappiness surrounding a divorce and the subtle ways that children press against the new, uncomfortable boundaries of their unsettled lives, I thought. But you’re right: the moment that Caro says that she did it for a trick…all was revealed, in a way that we don’t completely understand until later. (Assuming that the narrator’s memory of this is reliable.) And although that is one aspect of the story, it’s just one aspect of it. The question of what poses a risk is also interesting. The mother doesn’t seem to view her dramatic changing ideas about her own identity as posing a risk to her daughters, but she does view the “dog” (which Neal, at least, does not see as a risk) as a risk; she does not want Neal to discuss the atom bomb in front of the children because that risk would frighten them, but she cannot predict the risks that her daughter is willing to take in her everyday environment. In some ways, none of these risks exist, or at least cannot be tangibly proven to exist, because even the pit is filled in later and nobody would even know that it had been there. So sad, so unsettling. I wonder how different the story would have been, if told from the mother’s perspective, from a sibling’s perspective who had been older at the time, from the father’s perspective, or from Neal’s: interesting to think about, although now of course I cannot imagine it told any other way and it seems “the best”.
I can’t help but linger over the statement that to accept all means that you lessen tragedy. I just don’t know how that would work. To expand one’s happiness is always preferable, but sometimes, tragedy is there, and can’t be easily nodded away. I think this is one of the stories that I will get a lot out of, even if it does confuse me a little bit!
It is puzzling indeed. I won’t say anymore at this time, now that I know you’ve bought the collection, other than to agree that I think you’ll get a lot out of it, even the (especially the) puzzling bits!