Night Study Guide

Alice Munro was born Alice Laidlaw on July 10, 1931 in Ontario, Canada, to parents Robert and Ann. Her father’s work as a fox, mink, and turkey farmer appears often in her work. Munro’s short story “The Dimensions of a Shadow” was first published in 1950 while she was a student at the University of Western Ontario. In 1951, she married fellow student James Munro and left the university. The couple had four daughters, one of whom died the day of her birth. Munro polished her first collection of stories, Dance of the Happy Shades, in 1968 to much critical acclaim. She received the Governor General’s Award, which is Canada’s most prestigious literary prize, for the book. In 1972, Alice and James Munro divorced. Alice continued to publish short stories and collections, becoming a writer-in-residence at the University of Western Ontario. Upon returning to Ontario from Victoria, where she and James had lived, Alice reconnected with Gerald Fremlin, whom she had first met in university. The two married in 1976. Alice continued to write and tour, publishing 11 short story collections between 1978 and 2012. She won the 2009 Man Booker prize and the 2013 Nobel Prize in Literature for her body of work. She currently lives in Clinton, Ontario.

In the story, Munro mentions the “war and gas rationing.” During World War II, Canada joined many other countries in rationing on the home front to support the war effort. As a result, important goods such as gasoline, meat, sugar, butter, coffee, and alcohol were limited for average consumers. Munro’s invocation of this rationing indicates that, although the narrator and her family live on a farm that is relatively isolated, World War II influences the events of the story and the daily lives of the characters.

The book that “Night” appears in, Dear Life, was Alice Munro’s follow-up to her much-lauded book of short stories Runaway. Critics often compare Alice Munro and fellow Canadian woman writer Margaret Atwood. Atwood’s book of short stories, Good Bones and Simple Murders, offers a direct point of comparison. Critics and readers alike have often compared Munro to Anton Chekhov, whose widely anthologized stories  also deal with the complexities of everyday human life. Munro has cited Flannery O’Connor as an influence on her writing. O’Connor’s story “A Good Man is Hard to Find” inspired Munro’s story “Save the Reaper.”