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The Found Boat

• Alice Munro

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Alice Munro

• The strength of her fiction arises partially from
  its vivid sense of regional focus, most of her
  stories being set in Huron County, Ont, as well
  as from her sense of the narrator as the
  intelligence through which the world is
  articulated.

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Lake Huron
Toronto
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About rural southwestern Ontario.

• "'I don't think it's very different at all from
  the Midwest,' she says. 'There are nice
  old-looking towns, substantial towns, with big
  brick houses and big shade trees, large churches
  - many large churches -and factories that tend
  not to be operating any more. There's good
  farming land, and the lake - Lake Huron, 10 miles
  from where I live. And there's a kind of
  ritualistic wildness - pretty wild,
  self-destructive driving, a whole culture of
  sports -hockey is the big thing. . . .

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Alice Munro Themes and Style

• Gender Issues
• 1. the dilemmas of the adolescent girl coming to
  terms with family and small town
• 2. the problems of middle age, of women alone and
  of the elderly.
• Style
• Emphasis on an explosive momenta moment of
  revelation or a turning point.
• ''I don't understand where the excitement is
  supposed to come in a novel, and I do in a story.
  . . . I kind of want a moment that's explosive,
  and I want everything gathered into that.''

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The Found Boat

• Five Parts
• Discovery of the boat
• Fixing the boat
• Rowing the boat down the river
• The Pedder Train Station
• Truth or Dare

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The Found Boat--Questions

• How do the boys and girls relate to each other
  differently in these five parts? How does Eva
  feel about Clayton?
• Do you find the girls to daring in taking off
  their clothes?
• Symbolic meanings of
• debris, river, the forsaken train station,
  Claytons action, the names of Eva and Clayton.

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Gendering process in The Found Boat

• The division of boys and girls in the beginning
  of the story, as well as in the process of
  boat-fixing.
• The trip as a trip of transgressing gender
  boundaries.
• The trip ends up re-confirming gender
  boundaries, since womens bodies are vulnerable
  to rape and in need of protection.
• Ironically, it is the boy, but not God, that give
  Eva (Eve) her sense of shame.