LITERATURE

Similarity & Differences amidst Nettle's and the Bear Came over the Mountain



Similarity & Differences amidst Nettle's and the Bear Came over the Mountain

Nettles

The story is a said to be playful where female romantic fantasy is shown up as lie though sense of transgression when the schoolgirls' fantasy script is translated into a real-life narrative that produces a marriage and a child. That is not the end of the story however, for translation works both ways. When one of the girls hears the astonishing news about Johanna's baby she is doing her Latin homework at the kitchen table, and the words of Horace's Ode, which she is translating, take on a disturbing fullness, like a message from an ancient parallel world addressed directly to her. Caught within the frame of an entirely different text, that girl is forced to review her childish prank so that she finds herself more deeply implicated in real-life events than she could ever have imagined. This sudden shift in perspective produces a moment of radical dislocation in mental space for the character and for the reader as well, jolting us into paying a different kind of attention to those "really extraordinary things" within everyday life that so fascinate Munro (Heble, 1994).

It is an emphasis on adolescent girls and young women might be seen as a kind of overture to a collection where all the other stories represent experience through middle-aged or elderly people's lives, so that the sense of arbitrariness and displacement is amplified within the wider temporal frames of retrospective knowledge or prospects of imminent death. In most of these stories loss seems inevitable, though that is alleviated by a surprising amount of laughter— laughing fits, giggles, and smiles of all kinds: silly smiles, absentminded smiles, sly charming smiles, and even a "swish of tender hilarity," while there are lots of games and jokes—word jokes, practical jokes, and other more ambiguous or possibly malicious jokes (Munro, 1982).

The reader is challenged by Munro's familiarity and the unfamiliarity in a narrative set within a realistic framework, which at the same time exposes the limits of realism with its alternative realities, dream lives, secret lives, and a proliferation of subsidiary themes around one main event, that of Fiona's Alzheimer's and her removal to a nursing home. Grant thinks, it might be read as a husband's narrative of loss and memory that circles around his wife's absence; but Fiona is not dead. She is still alive and now living in an institution from which he is shut out most of the time so that her life has become a mystery to him, as he is reminded on every visit. Confronted with the evidence of her changing identity and her new emotional relationship with a fellow patient called Aubrey, Grant is forced to consider how that affects his own relationship with his wife, so that his story of mourning slips into a different genre altogether as it assumes the configurations of a plot about marital infidelity and a husband's ...