Friend of My Youth

Munro’s use of first-person narration creates intimacy between the reader and the narrator, while at the same time limiting the story’s scope. It puts the reader in the position of the narrator and makes the story a mystery that the narrator and reader are trying to solve together, as the reader does not have access to any information or point-of-view other than the narrator’s.

In place of certainties, the narrator can only speculate, and there are several passages in the story where she enters into the consciousness of different characters, trying to imagine what they were feeling and thinking. For example, she imagines Flora reacting to Audrey Atkinson’s disruptive presence in her house: “[…] now the pale face of Flora appears behind the new net curtains. She has dragged herself from her corner, she sees the light-blue sky with its high skidding clouds over the watery fields, the contending crows, the flooded creeks […]” (21). The narrator is a fiction writer, which makes these imaginative leaps plausible. We also understand the emotional impulses behind her fictional embellishing. In expanding on the story that her mother has told her, she sees herself as revealing some of the hypocrisies and pieties of her mother’s generation.