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Plot And Conflict In Alice Munro's 'Runaway'

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Runaway Theme, Plot and Conflict Theme: Through ‘Runaway’, Alice Munro intends to show that women themselves are the source of the problem as they resist change, especially women like Carla who are so used to their lives in the countryside that they are mostly dependent on the source of income, in this case, Clark. She may have also written this to depict events of her own life, when she divorced her first husband, James Munro to get a sense of real freedom and joy but soon after married a second husband because she did not like her life so much. In ‘Runaway’, Carla is shown to be a very complex and intricate character as she realizes her limitations when making her own decisions. Initially, Carla seems confident to leave Clark and Sylvia helps her to escape, but as soon as she gets of the bus station outside of town, she realizes she can’t really survive without his security …show more content…

In ‘Runaway’, the plot is extremely slow initially but speeds up towards the end and this makes for a great an impactful effect on the reader. The central plot is based around events that happen in the protagonist’s life. Her happiness is faced with a demanding husband and a peculiar relationship with the neighbor, Sylvia Jamieson. Munro develops the story from the perspective of a 3rd person omniscient by voicing Carla’s emotion and her misery, which then builds into desperation when she goes to Sylvia’s house and cries until she finally decides to escape her cramped life at the farm. But Munro realizes that this is not an ideal world that we live in and makes the ending far more realistic than what the reader would expect. Carla goes out of the village only to come back a few hours later, Sylvia moves to the city where she finds a safe haven and Carla finds what seems to be Flora’s

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