Abstract
This chapter contends that Munro uses child characters and narrators to explore relational and fluid narrative perspectives and themes of attachment in the context of an ethics of “uncertainty,” to borrow a term from Brian Massumi’s Politics of Affect. ‘Being ethical’ is not a fixed state but a process initiated in response to affective forces and worldly boundaries. Sutherland argues that in Munro’s work, characters and narrators “inhabit” ethically ambiguous situations, experiences and perspectives as sites of agentic quandary and potential. This chapter specifically considers how Munro’s child characters occupy these sites, generating intense affects and potent narrative agency while paradoxically remaining inscrutable and/or inarticulate. This paradoxical childish inscrutability exposes the ethical fluidity of performed subjectivities, opening an alternative space alongside (adult) normative habitude.
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Sutherland, K.G. (2018). Child’s Play: Ethical Uncertainty and Narrative Play in the Work of Alice Munro. In: DeFalco, A., York, L. (eds) Ethics and Affects in the Fiction of Alice Munro. Palgrave Studies in Affect Theory and Literary Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-90644-7_8
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