What Makes “Forgiveness in Families” Interesting, and “The Innocent Traveller”...Not

Alice Munro’s “Forgiveness in Families” is a short work of only a few pages, but within those pages the main character, Val, goes through more change than does Topaz, the main character in “The Innocent Traveller,” throughout Ethel Wilson’s entire novel. This makes “Forgiveness” interesting and compelling, and “The Innocent Traveller” rather boring.

Topaz is a static character, hardly changing throughout her life. We are not given much insight into what she thinks; there is not enough depth to her to keep us interested for the duration of the novel.

In “Forgiveness,” Val realizes that it is herself, not her brother, that is the cause of her problems. She reflects on the nature of life and death, realizing that the seemingly insignificant things, which “don’t seem that much like life,” are in fact what we yearn for when faced with death. She makes the startling confession that, in some part of her, she was disappointed when her mother did not die.

This revelation is shocking, it is personal, it makes us feel something... These are the things which “The Innocent Traveller” largely fails to do. Characters die in the novel, family dynamics change, Topaz moves to a new city halfway around the world, but none of this is related in a way which makes us feel much excitement, compassion, or emotion in general. We get mostly only the surface of things, and for a work of more than two hundred pages, this is not enough.

I don't think the blogging program likes indentation

Do you guys know how to edit our posts?

Let's see if this works :)

Life as a narrative is a thought that is echoed in stories that tout realism as their main theme. Stories like “In Vancouver” are an example; these stories illustrate how one can look at life as one giant story. They depict storied events as being real, and they do this by adding in details of events.

The sign in “In Vancouver” advertising the different type of workers needed lends a certain amount of realism to the story by virtue of the detail presented on it. This was added detail in the story to lead us to recreate the event of walking down Grainger’s Vancouver’s streets in our minds; this is unlike how memory works.

I attest that the human mind does the reverse; that all people remember is the narrative or the story part of an event, not he details. When we recall events in our lives the details get washed out and we are left with the who, what, when, where and why but not the specifics, such as a sign’s details. Therefore realism seems to want to recreate an event rather than the memory or story of the event; bring us to that place let us imagine those events happen to us. This is the intent of Martin Grainger, to bring us to his Vancouver, as real as he can make it, so that we can make our own, fictional memories of it. That seems to be his intent, making it real enough, that when we recall the story it looks enough like a memory to be indistinct from the real thing; that when we remember back we have the memory of the sign that was hanging in the street advertising for the different tradesman.

i made the blog

guess what? i made the blog. peace out girl scout(s).