24 pages • 48 minutes read
Friend of My Youth
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Literary Devices
First-Person Narration
Munro’s use of first-person narration creates intimacy between the reader and the narrator, while at the same time limiting the story’s scope. It puts the reader in the position of the narrator and makes the story a mystery that the narrator and reader are trying to solve together, as the reader does not have access to any information or point-of-view other than the narrator’s.
In place of certainties, the narrator can only speculate, and there are several passages in the story where she enters into the consciousness of different characters, trying to imagine what they were feeling and thinking. For example, she imagines Flora reacting to Audrey Atkinson’s disruptive presence in her house: “[…] now the pale face of Flora appears behind the new net curtains. She has dragged herself from her corner, she sees the light-blue sky with its high skidding clouds over the watery fields, the contending crows, the flooded creeks […]” (21). The narrator is a fiction writer, which makes these imaginative leaps plausible. We also understand the emotional impulses behind her fictional embellishing. In expanding on the story that her mother has told her, she sees herself as revealing some of the hypocrisies and pieties of her mother’s generation. By transforming her mother into the character of Flora, the narrator attempts to better understand her after her passing.
Temporal Leaps
The story skips backwards and forwards in time frequently: There is the middle-aged narrator who tells the story from some point in time after all the events have taken place, but who also looks back on her youth, when she first heard the story from her mother. The story of Flora and Ellie takes place in the narrator’s mother’s own youth, long before the narrator was born. Additionally, the narrator’s observations of her own feelings as she tells the story are communicated in present tense.
The effect of these temporal leaps is to show us the disorientation of the narrator’s grief. She is mourning her mother, and the past is very alive for her, to the point where she often confuses it with the present. At the same time she cannot quite face her own grief; she can only approach it indirectly, through telling us the story of the Grieves sisters. Even then, her mother is always taking this story over: “Of course it’s my mother I’m thinking of, my mother as she was in those dreams, saying, It’s nothing, just this little tremor […]” (25). It is the simultaneous unbearableness and unavoidability of the narrator’s grief that give the story its momentum. The present tense narration locates the reader in the narrator’s processing of these emotions, even as the story’s plot largely unfolds in the past.
Meta-Fictional Exposition and Analysis
There are many passages in this story where the narrator interprets the story for the reader, drawing the reader’s attention to the fact that they are reading. She explains to us what her motivations were in resisting her mother and being skeptical of her mother’s account of the Grieves sisters: “I had to keep myself sharp-tongued and cynical, arguing and deflating” (20). Later in the story, she imagines running into Flora Grieves, and speculates at length about Flora Grieves’s new life; she then tells us that she is really thinking about her mother.
Passages like these establish the narrator as an introspective, self-aware character, with an intelligent understanding of her story. At the same time, they show the limits of this understanding. For all of the narrator’s intelligence, she is still at the mercy of irrational forces. She is grieving her mother, and her grief takes forms that she can’t control, even if she can try to explain them. The story ends with a recurrent dream that the narrator once had about her mother, shortly after her mother’s death. As if to prevent the dream from defining her experience of grief, the narrator then shares some facts that she has learned about the Cameronians: the Grieves family’s religion. These facts have an abrupt, jarring effect, after the introspection of the narration: “They hacked the haughty Bishop of St. Andrews to death on the highway and rode their horses over his body” (26). The violence of this language, and the narrator’s refusal to explain it for the reader, sets into the relief the turbulent and unreconciled feelings of the narrator.
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