Alice Munro's Dimension: An Analysis

(Alice Munro’s short story ‘Dimension’ is anthologized in ‘The Best American Short Stories 2007 edited by Stephen King. The following reflection and craft analysis contains spoilers so if you are at all intrigued by the story, I would suggest reading the story first before reading my analysis.)

When I read Alice Munro’s ‘Dimension’ I feel like I’m standing at the edge of an ice shelf in Antarctica that is about to break apart and collapse into the icy waters, taking me along with it. I gather ominous signs; I hear deep rumblings, I feel the ice underneath my feet sway slightly but I have no idea what is about to happen until the very last moment when it happens. In this story, Munro deploys her formidable story-telling abilities to create and sustain a sense of foreboding right from the get-go to the climax of the story about halfway through the story (more on this unusual structure later). As a reader, I feel myself dragged inexorably along with the narrative arc of the story, reeled in inch by inch by Munro’s prescient ability to reveal just the right amount of information about her characters and their circumstances to sustain my interest in the story. If that is all there is to this story, it would still have been an extremely worthwhile read but of course, Munro is not content to just tell a suspenseful story. She wants us to get into the psychological and emotional lives of her characters and it is this deeper underlying psychological storyline that she builds concurrent to the main action of the story and develops to its very satisfying resolution in the last half of the story that is the true focus of her story-telling.

The main structure of the story is a little unusual in that the climax occurs approximately halfway through the story with the denouement taking up the final half. Given the length of the denouement, we can surmise that what Munro really wants to explore is not so much the events leading up to the climax but the aftermath of the climax. The climax in this story is a tragic event that involves the lives of the members a working class Canadian family; Doree, the wife, Lloyd the husband and their three children. Munro opens the story in the aftermath of the tragic event and very skillfully weaves in the events and circumstances leading up to the tragic event by intermittent flashbacks. Immediately following the climax of the story, when the tragic event is revealed, the story shifts to how the protagonists (Doree and Lloyd) deal with the fallout from their actions (or non-actions, as the case may be) that resulted in the tragic event. It is this exploration of how the protagonists deal with the consequences of their actions that is the emotional underpinning of the story.

By alternating the aftermath story with the flashbacks, Munro is able to sustain the reader’s suspense as she engages in her psychological explorations of her characters’ inner lives. One of the things I’m amazed by with Munro’s story (and the few other stories of hers that I’ve read over the years) is her ability to condense the complex inner lives of her characters into tiny precious drops of speech and actions. Very rarely will she go into the abstract when describing the inner psychological state of her characters. Instead, we can sense Doree’s nervousness by the word games she plays in her head on the bus trip to the prison. We learn about Lloyd’s insufferable arrogance by the way he talks about medical professionals and the way he talks to Doree.

As I mentioned above, the suspense is created right from the get-go after Doree has been introduced to us. In the third paragraph, we know that ‘none of the people she worked with knew what had happened.’ and that whatever has happened happened in a public way (‘Her picture had been in the paper’). We also know that she’s trying to start over. She’s changed her looks, her name, her job, her home. What happened? The story at this point seems to suggest that she may have committed some crime, or have otherwise done something deserving of shame and public condemnation. Where was she going? Munro’s description of the other passengers on the bus seems to suggest a place associated with shame (They…dressed…to make themselves look as if they were going to church.) Also, as mentioned above, it is clear that there is a lot of anxiety associated with the place she’s going to from the way Munro describes the word games that Doree plays in her head on the bus trip.

In the next paragraph, Munro introduces Mrs. Sands without really telling us who she is and her relationship to Doree but we can glean from the description of their interaction that she is acting as a counselor of some sort to Doree. Everything we’ve read up to this point seems to confirm that Doree must have done something wrong in the past and is trying to turn over a new leaf. At the very end of the paragraph, Munro deftly insinuates ‘death’ into the discussion and all of a sudden, the ante is upped. We know that someone, likely Doree had done something wrong, and a life had been taken. The foreshadows lengthen.

The next paragraph, the first of many flashbacks, fills in the backstory of Doree’s family mainly how she met Lloyd and married him. In this paragraph, we see early inklings about Lloyd’s character by the opinions he holds about medical professionals. What I really love about Munro’s writing and is in full display in this paragraph is her powerful observation of details and the ability to fashion your average workaday character doing average workaday things like work, fall in love and get married without sounding clichéd and pedestrian. The end of this paragraph is where we see Munro’s genius at work. At first glance the last line of the paragraph, ‘Sasha was born’, seems to and does follow naturally from the description of Doree’s family life. But, given the ominous foreshadowing already at play and given what we know at this point, the fact that Munro ends the paragraph abruptly with that stark sentence and reverts to the aftermath narrative of the story leaves us deeply unsettled. The ante has just been upped again. We know that a. someone, possibly Doree had done something wrong b. a life was taken and now c. that life could possibly be a child’s. Hers.

The next paragraph finally dispels any suspicion about Doree’s culpability. We know that it is this person that Doree is spending hours on the bus for that is the guilty one (The first two times I never saw him…He wouldn’t come out.) We can probably already guess at this point that that person must be Lloyd. Throughout the story until the climax is reached, Munro continues to alternate between the present time frame in the aftermath of the tragic event and the time frame leading up to the tragic event. She also continues to fill out Lloyd’s character as an arrogant, controlling, chauvinistic know-it-all who detests people in authority especially if they are in the medical profession and especially if they are women. Again, it is the details that Munro supplies about his behavior and speech that we get this sense of Lloyd. I really like the part of the narrative where Lloyd, suspicious of how Doree was raising HIS child, squeezed her breasts to try and verify her claim that her milk had run dry. I also like how Munro portrays Lloyd through his summary pronouncements; a lot of medicine was a fraud and a lot of doctors were jerks (arrogant, suspicious of authority), I tell him he’s wasting his time, I know as much as he does (know-it-all), you want to speak to the ole lady (chauvinistic), Lezzie and Bitch-out-of-hell (fear of assertive women). Munro continues to turn the reader against Lloyd by leaking more and more details about his paranoid nature, going through Doree’s dresser looking for birth-control pills, berating Doree for spending time with Maggie. Munro also shows us Doree’s role in her marriage, as a long-suffering wife who has no other plan for her life than to be a good mother and supporter of her husband. She is willing to put up with his paranoia, his put downs, his criticisms, his smug pronouncements because she is scared of losing him, scared of losing the one thing in her life that held any meaning for her.

Munro’s prodigious use of descriptive details in this story is noteworthy but I must also mention that details alone does not a story make. Munro is not one of those writers who lavishes her stories with details simply for the sake of it, interesting though those details may be. Her descriptions do real work to propel the narrative forward. For example, her paragraph describing the Christian pamphleteer thrusting a pamphlet in Doree’s hands while she is waiting to see Mrs. Sands accomplishes two tasks. One, it gives us a sense of the community that the story takes place in, a conservative Christian community similar to the American Midwest. More importantly, it sets up the sentence that has Doree contemplating the prospect of Lloyd burning in Hell. This is important narrative work because we now know that whatever crime Lloyd has committed is not some misdemeanor. No, this is a crime against the Lord Himself, a crime so heinous that burning in Hell would be the appropriate punishment.

The line ‘It got worse, gradually.’ opens the paragraph that will finally crescendo in short order to the climax of the story, the tragic event that Munro has been preparing us for. The story is chock full of irony, sometimes only apparent on a re-reading (Lloyd’s line, ‘Think of the kids.’ is just one.) Actually, a few details of the story gave me the chills on re-reading. Lloyd’s phone conversation with Maggie, after he had murdered the kids is one. Munro is quite relentless in turning the reader against Lloyd. There is absolutely not a shred of redeeming quality about him (save one, which I will get to in a second) and just when you think there could not be anything worse he could do to earn our condemnation (murdering your three kids with your bare hands is about as low as you can get as a human being), Munro stuns us with the final line of the climax paragraph, a line that Lloyd nonchalantly throws at Doree as she staggers out of the house in horror, “You brought it all on yourself.”

The paragraph immediately following that horrifying line initiates the denouement of the story where all is revealed and we know that Lloyd has been committed to an institution for the criminally insane and Mrs. Sands is a counselor assigned to help Doree cope with the aftermath of the tragedy. At this point, any good textbook on fiction writing would recommend ending the story as quickly as possible and had Munro taken this route, the story would still have been a worthwhile read. But of course, Munro does not take this route. The story continues for another thirteen pages, as long as the build up to the climax. A lesser writer attempting this writing strategy would likely meander around, wasting the reader’s time but Munro has legitimate reasons for prolonging the story. As I mentioned before in the introduction, Munro’s real interest in the story is not simply to titillate and shock us with the events that lead up to the tragic event but in how the protagonists deal with the aftermath of the event. It is this exploration that imbues the story with a greater sense of profundity and showcases Munro’s incredibly astute observation of human psychology in dealing with tragedy.

The denouement continues the narrative arc of the story and Munro’s ability to sustain the reader’s interest in what happens next with searing images shows no signs of abating. The one image that will never leave my head is that of Doree stuffing dirt, grass, sheets and towels in her mouth ‘to stifle not just the howls that rose up but the scene in her head.’ Munro then goes on to describe in more detail the events that led immediately up to the tragic event and as we are all familiar with Munro’s style by now, we are not surprised that it started with some mundane thing like a tin of spaghetti. At this point, we’re probably wondering why Doree would still want to continue seeing Lloyd even though he had completely decimated her life. It is this central question that drives the rest of the story. Munro begins her exploration by throwing us this line that Lloyd himself throws at the police, “I did it to save them the misery. The misery of knowing that their mother had walked out on them.” As if we needed more reasons to feel disgusted with Lloyd. So perhaps, Munro wonders, Doree is seeking to make Lloyd take back the guilt that he had placed on her with that line. It is not completely incomprehensible that Doree would feel a measure of guilt as her life had been so circumscribed by Lloyd’s opinions of her. Perhaps Doree wants to, for once in her life, prove Lloyd wrong by showing him that he was the one who was crazy. Perhaps, she wants to see him mentally and emotionally beaten down, defeated, so unlike the real Lloyd in her mind that had terrorized her life that she can simply dismiss this pathetic physical one sitting in front of her as a figment of her imagination. Munro will continue to explore this question for the rest of the story.

The story would of course not be complete without an exploration of Lloyd’s state of mind in the aftermath of his crime. Munro accomplishes this through a letter he sends to Doree. This is the point where Munro unearths perhaps the central irony of the story; that this monster, this pig of a man who murdered his own children, should be the one who receives the privilege of inner peace when Doree the long-suffering wife whose life was devastated by him is still in deep turmoil. As if that wasn’t enough, the irony continues in the second letter, when Lloyd becomes her savior as it were by showing her a way out of the morass of her emotional pain. It is easy at this point, I suppose (and Munro seems to encourage this) for the reader to completely disengage with Lloyd. I mentioned before that we see not a shred of redeeming quality in him. Save one. And here, in the denouement is where Munro shows us why we should still continue to care about Lloyd. In his letters, he shows himself to be very sane indeed and more importantly, someone with not a small amount of introspection and self-awareness. Notice that Munro does not have him show remorse. No, we the readers know that Lloyd is beyond redemption and Munro is astute enough to know that and not once in his letters does he ask for forgiveness. She does not attempt to get us to change our minds about Lloyd because she knows that she has taken him to a place that is beyond redemption. Instead, Munro has Lloyd embark on an inner journey towards peace. In the letter, she immediately dispels any notion that he is crazy (although she allows room later in the story for that possibility, I for one am absolutely convinced that though he may have been ‘temporarily insane’ when he committed his heinous act, he is most assuredly sane now). He is certainly acutely aware of the extent of his crimes and was at some point emotionally distraught over his actions. Finally, he is able to arrive at that place practitioners of Buddhistic meditation call ‘samadhi’, that pinnacle of inner peace arrived at usually after years of practice (and usually without murdering your kids). I personally find Lloyd’s rumination to be quite intriguing. Here we find the incredible irony that while the rest of us, the blameless ones toil away at our everyday lives never achieving the deep inner peace we so strive for, he, the guilty one should be set free from the burdens of daily living and be given the opportunity to search for and eventually find ‘samadhi’. His second letter certainly testifies to the fact that he is well aware of that irony. Not only does he arrive at inner peace, he, not Doree is able to reconnect with the kids that he had murdered in some mystical dimension and becomes in a way a savior figure to Doree. How do I feel about Lloyd after reading his letters? Some readers may be further incensed by his lack of remorse or his continued denial. I, for one, completely buy his arguments. I don’t believe he is any more deserving of forgiveness than before I read his letter but I believe him when he says he’s arrived at a state of inner peace and heightened self-awareness and even his mystical connection with his kids. I do believe that it is those people who have seen themselves at their worst who are able to get past themselves to ‘samadhi’. I do not forgive him, I do not excuse him, but I still engage with him because of his insights.

How does Doree feel about Lloyd after reading his letters? Munro says she still thought he was crazy and we can perhaps wonder if Munro herself thinks he is indeed crazy. She certainly cannot fathom the prospect of ever loving him or being loved by him again. Nor is forgiveness even remotely considered (I didn't say forgive. I would never say that. I would never do it). However, as I mentioned above she does derive some modicum of comfort from his second letter. So perhaps, the answer to the question of why she continues to go see him is habit. He has always been the pillar of her life, the person who made the decisions, who had all the answers, even though the answers may be ones she disagreed with. Lloyd was the captain of her life and her role was to obey, a role that did not change even when he had committed the ultimate crime against her and even when he is locked up, unable to physically direct her life. She continues to see him because he has always had all the answers and she desperately needs the answer to the question of how she is suppose to cope with all that he had wrought upon her. The irony of course, is that he DOES have the answer and now we have to wonder, “Will she ever break free from his gravitational pull? Will she ever find another source of meaning for her life other than to follow the path that he has set for her?” It is this final question that Munro will use to drive the rest of the narrative.

At the beginning of the denouement to this extended denouement, Munro would have us believe that she may not escape Lloyd’s gravitational pull after all. (What other use could she be in the world… if not at least to listen to him? Who but Lloyd would remember the children’s names now, or the color of their eyes?) It would seem that, like a Muslim pilgrim making the Hajj, she would be condemned to spend the rest of her life on the bus making the pilgrimage to see Lloyd. But thankfully, Munro gives Doree a way out. In dramatic fashion, she has Doree witness an accident and (thanks to Lloyd’s training) was able to save the life of the victim. Doree realizes from this experience that ‘she was put on earth’ not to just ‘be with him and try to understand him’. No, she has another role, to keep the boy alive. Yes, it is because of Lloyd that she is able to perform this heroic act but in this small act of saving his life, she stumbles on an alternative track for her emotional train that had Lloyd as a distant, magical destination that she will never arrive at. Thus, the answer to the question of whether or not she will ever break free from his hold is given in the brilliant final line of the story.

No.

No, she does not have to get to London. She now has other places to go.