‘Chance’ by Alice Munro

Chance by Alice Munro, 2004

The magic trick:

Playing with ideas of linear storytelling and life-living

Alice Munro really never betrayed the short story. It was her chosen canvas throughout her remarkable career. But sometimes she played with the boundaries. There are story collections that could be taken as story cycles or even episodic novels. There is the quartet of autobiographical stories that close her final Dear Life collection, veering ever so slightly into memoir territory.

And there is the trio of stories in the Runaway collection, each featuring Juliet Henderson. Together, they can be considered a novella. Pedro Almodóvar considered them a movie (he stitched them together into a script for his 2016 Julieta film).

The first in the set is “Chance,” wherein 21-year-old Juliet is traveling by train to meet a man she once kissed. That’s really the best way to put it. He’s not an old friend or former lover. He is perhaps a future lover. We don’t know. She doesn’t either.

The train trip gives Munro the chance to do some neat things with timelines and memory and intersection and chance. The journey itself can very easily be pictured as linear. Point A to Point B. Predictable. Literally on a track.

The narrative, however, jumps around through Juliet’s head. Sometimes her thoughts and memories run long enough to develop a certain linear logic of their own. Most of the time, they bounce back and forth.

Munro even gets the narration explicitly in on the act when she drops a parenthetical response to one of Juliet’s thoughts – “(Actually, she did tell this a few years later, to a woman named Christa, a woman whose name she did not yet know.)”

It’s a brazen move from the author; some might argue it goes too far, taking the reader out of the story and into some godlike viewpoint. But I like it.

And that’s quite a trick on Munro’s part.

The selection:

He said, “Haven’t you ever wanted to do that to anybody before?”

“Yes. But I’ve never done it. I’ve never gone so far. And why I did it this time—it was because he was so humble. And he had all new clothes on that he’d probably bought for the trip. He was probably depressed and thought that travelling would be a good way to meet people and make friends. Maybe if he’d just been going a little way—” she added. “But he said he was going to Vancouver and I would have been saddled with him. For days.”

“Yes.”

“I really might have been.”

“Yes.”

“So.”

“Rotten luck,” he said, smiling a very little. “The first time you get up the nerve to give somebody the gears he throws himself under a train.”

“It may have been the last straw,” she said, now feeling slightly defensive. “It may have been.”

“I guess you’ll just have to watch out, in future.”

Juliet raised her chin and looked at him steadily. “You mean I’m exaggerating.”

Then something happened that was as sudden and unbidden as her tears. Her mouth began to twitch. Unholy laughter was rising.

“I guess it is a little extreme,” she said.

He said, “A little.”

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