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Alice Munro's Open Secrets explores the use of narrative through multiplicity. There is a layering of narratives throughout all eight short stories in the collection. Her work has been referred to as "magical" by Nathalie Foy, "magic has a dark side, an intricacy, and an exclusivity…the power of magic lies in the gap between what is revealed and what is hidden" (148). Munro shows the reader what he needs to know therefore, leaving the gaps as "open secrets" available for interpretation. Her work is magical also in the sense that they are intricate, containing many layers that combine reality and fantasy (Foy 149). The protagonists in Munro's stories allow their "real" life to intersect with their "fantasy" life. For example in "Vandals" while Louisa is on the guided tour with Ladner she says, "by this time lust was lost to her altogether…she had long since stopped fixing her eyes on a spot between his shoulder blades and willing him to turn around and embrace her" (Munro 318). Her romantic ideology of what she felt should be taking place fell though which resulted in a jolt back into the real. According to Freud, fantasy is the freedom from the grip of the external world, a freedom based on an urge to withdraw involving a search for a symbolic landscape…a movement away from an artificial world, a world identified without art" (Lecker 104).
Approximate Word count = 771
Approximate Pages = 3.1
(250 words per page double spaced)
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