The View From Castle Rock Analysis

Dear, lady and gentlemen,

To write about the own life, is a popular topic in a wide range of media in Germany as well in Canada. For instance, the scholar Julia Rank uses the term “life-writing” to describe a broad genre in a Canadian context, including all types of factual literature which record life-stories as memoirs, diaries, letters. According to her, memoir becomes popular in Canadian literature in the late 1970s. She is even speaking of a “boom” in the context of biography. It is obvious that the increasing interest in “life writing” is related to an uncertainty about the own identity in the modern and post-modern age. Discussions about “narrative identity” or in that way identities are constructed indicates that identity is perceived as something constructed that bears similarity to literature. The noble-price winning Canadian author Alice Munro reflects this tendency in her short story “No Advantages” by depicting a protagonist who travels to Scotland to reconstruct the life-story of her ancestors. I will argue that her story leads the readers to think about the

But not enough to swear on. And the part of the book that might be called family story has expanded into fiction, but always within the outline of a true narrative”. Here the author states that the stories in “The View from Castle Rock” differ from other stories since she attempts to write about herself in these stories. Therefore, they seem to head towards factual life-writing, but the author sharply draws a distinction between the story and memoir, since the “centering on her self” let her create figures and stories that are independent of her intention. Even though she would eagerly try to stick to facts, her imagination would prevent her from doing so. Later, we will see how the narrator refers to the poetic program of the author to the point that the readers connect the author to the