Perspective Evoloved

3 Pages 682 Words

Perspective Evolved
Life is not shy about offering its little lessons. It is without doubt that every person’s journey offers its own unique teachings, with often hard to learn material. However, it is through these trails that people grow, mature, and reshape, once cemented, point of views. Alice Munro’s “An Ounce of Cure” illustrates that while life is forging wisdom it is not necessarily the easiest thing to accept, but through time, and the perspective altering ability it has, what at what point seems to be endless despair becomes another lesson learned. The Narrator in “An Ounce of Cure” takes the reader on a peregrination into severe, youthful heartache, and the drunkenness that inevitably accompanies it. Munro skillfully uses point of view to guide the reader through the Narrator’s sorrow, and into her first drunken episode, until she emerges into the mature adult who reflects to tell the story.
The narrator, who is also the protagonist, tells “An Ounce of Cure” in the past tense. Munro uses this technique to give the reader immediate contrast between the opposing points of view the narrator has as the story progresses. The story begins with the narrator briefly telling of her love, Martin Collingwood. It quickly progresses to the point where Martin dumps her; this is where the heartache begins. The narrator reflectively admits her stupidity when she concludes “But it doesn’t really make me very gay-worse still, it doesn’t really surprise me-to remember all the stupid, sad, half ashamed things I did, that people in love always do” (452). This sentence shows how her adult perspective is ashamed at what she did when she was looking through the situation with a different point of view as an adolescent. While she was in this dreadful heartache she did what a lot of young heartbroken kids do, dwell on the very few good moments that made up the relationship that is causing all the torment. The narrator i...