LITERATURE: The Moons of Jupiter – Complex Simplicity

Munro for a rainy day. I learn so much from her.

She draws her characters out so carefully, each and every one.  Here, in the short story The Stone in the Field, we have a visit to the narrator’s father’s family home, where his five sisters still live on in an era bypassed by change. The aunts are all discomforted a bit by this visit interrupting their routine, and the narrator tries to remember a time earlier when they were more social and individual. Munro sketches their life through their surroundings, the spit-polished yet bare kitchen, their reticence at conversation, their ignorance of their furniture as "antiques," and their shy yet more human reaction to gentle teasing by their brother–the narrator’s father. 

Then Munro uses just a single incident from the past and a simple dialogue to enforce the passing of time and its effect on these sisters as a dramatic point:

He told me how he had left home. Actually there were two leave-takings. The first occurred the summer he was fourteen.  His father had sent him out to split some chunks of wood.  He broke the ax-handle, and his father cursed him out and went after him with a pitchfork. His father was know for temper, and hard work.  The sisters screamed, and my father, the fourteen year-old boy, took off down the lane running as hard as he could.
"Could they scream?"
"What? Oh yes. Then. Yes they could."  (p. 29)

What an enormously powerful image that gives us, after feeling the loneliness and acceptance of their lives limited by their dedication to their small world, to hear them screaming. To see a sudden flurry of violent activity in contrast to the quiet setting Munro has placed us in. To note a hesitancy in the father’s own pondering of the image as he recalls it, as if it were amazing to him as well.