Point of view in Alice Munro's “Runaway”: A cognitive study

Abstract

This study concerns itself with Joanna Gavins's text world theory (Gavins, Text world theory: An introduction, Edinburgh University Press, 2007) and examines its benefits for the analysis of point of view in a literary text. It works on Alice Munro's “Runaway” (Munro, Runaway: Stories, A Douglas Gibson Book, 2004) the complicated narration of which is filtered through the floating perspective facilitated by free indirect discourse. While the text-world level proposed by Gavins's theory reveals the many biases and prejudices of the floating point of view, the discourse-world level opens up a space to investigate how readerly cognition is cued and prompted by the text. This study investigates Munro's character representation through the boulomaic, deontic, and epistemic modal-worlds in an attempt to reveal how the floating narrator hides her biases and prejudices behind a gesture to neutrality and omnipresence. At the discourse-world level, the paper addresses the issue of authorly and readerly empathy.