earticle

영어

This paper examines how Alice Munro portrays the narrator’s growth as a storyteller and writer in “Friend of My Youth” while challenging the boundaries between fiction and reality through metafictional reflections on the act of storytelling and narrativity. Munro’s short story is a distinct retrospective narrative in that it begins with a story of the narrator’s dreams and moves on to the main narrative in which the narrator retells her mother’s story of her friend, Flora Grieves, using the romance mode. The story constantly points to the gaps between narration and discourse and attempts to expand the possibilities of what has happened through dreams and imagination. It also turns attention to the intervention of subjective perspectives and interpretations in recreating the past as a story. In the ending, the frame story of the narrator’s dream is connected to the story of Flora as the narrator imagines what could have happened with Flora. The narrator, now a mature storyteller and writer, recognizes otherness by critically distancing herself from the idea that she can know someone through a story told to her. In doing so, she presents the past not as a time closed to what has already happened, but as a time open to what has yet to be told.