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2022, Vol. 19 (1), 29-40(126)
journals.uni-lj.si/elope
https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.19.1.29-40
UDC: 821.111(71).09-32Munro A. 
Iris Lucio-Villegas Spillard
University of La Rioja, Spain
“Honey, Where Are the Kids?”: Motifs of the 
Past, Water, and Photography in Munro’s Stories 
Featuring Dead Children
ABSTRACT
As indicated by many critics, the death of children features prominently in Alice Munro’s 
short fiction. This paper approaches the theme in six of her short stories from the standpoint 
of her personal experience to establish shared elements that combine to build the narratives, 
reverberating in her writing. These elements are the past, water, and photography. The 
argument and literary exploration are grounded on previous literature on the author, short 
story theory, and photography theory, and ultimately pursue a double objective, i.e., to 
develop an interpretation of the figure of the lost child in Munro’s work, while providing 
supporting evidence for the autobiographical nature of her literature. 
Keywords: Alice Munro, death of children, autobiography, the past, water, photography
»Kje so otroci?«: Motivi preteklosti, vode in fotografije v zgodbah 
Alice Munro, v katerih nastopajo liki mrtvih otrok
IZVLEČEK
Številni kritiki ugotavljajo, da smrt otrok zavzema pomembno mesto v kratki prozi Alice 
Munro. Pričujoči prispevek obravnava to temo v avtoričinih šestih kratkih zgodbah z vidika 
njene osebne izkušnje, z namenom določiti skupne elemente, ki se povezujejo v pripovedi, ki 
odmevajo v avtoričinih delih. Ti elementi so preteklost, voda in fotografija. Naši argumenti in 
raziskovanje se naslanjajo na predhodno literaturo o avtorici, teorijo kratke zgodbe in teorijo 
fotografije ter sledijo dvema ciljema, tj. razviti interpretacijo podobe izgubljenega otoka v 
delih A. Munro in dodatno potrditi avtobiografsko razsežnost njenih del.
Ključne besede: Alice Munro, smrt otrok, avtobiografija, preteklost, voda, fotografija
30 Iris Lucio-Villegas Spillard “Honey, Where Are the Kids?”: Motifs of the Past, Water, and Photography in Munro’s …
1 Introduction
If death has always been an essential subject in literature (Dasenbrock 2021), the figure of 
ultimate absence, the lost child, is also recurrent in culture and throughout time as a universal 
haunting presence that we inevitably carry within us as trauma. The loss of innocence, of the 
past, and of the essence of our undisturbed identity metamorphoses into images and narratives 
in the form of the death of children (Froud 2017a). In literature, the memory and truth of 
childhood sink into the forgetfulness and nontruth of adulthood, the presence and life of the 
child entering the realms of absence of pure knowledge and death (Derrida 1998). In short 
fiction in particular, the epistemological traits and spatial constraints of the genre link this 
loss to the immaterial reality of the author’s inner world, an enlightened place of insight into 
truth, a place transformed into “human experience distilled in black ink on paper” (Thomas 
1999, viii), which signifies and emotionally isolates the event outside the temporal and social 
context of long fiction to provide a fragmented and possibly more real portrayal of the human 
condition and our encounter with the sacred (Brown 1997; Iftekharuddin, Rohrberger, and 
Lee 1997; May 1994; Trussler 1996). Storytelling intertwines cultural conceptions of death 
with the author’s remembrance and psychology to combine seemingly incongruous elements 
into an “existential temporal horizon” (Trussler 1996, 563) where the safety of everyday life 
is disrupted, and the starkness of reality revealed (May 1994). 
This connects short fiction narratives with the inner world and personal experience of 
writers, and, in this sense, no Munro reader can fail to notice how prominently the death 
of children features in her work. Although critics have analysed this theme in some of her 
stories (Bigot 2017; Heble 1994; Morgenstern 2018; Omhovère 2018; Sutherland 2018; 
Warwick 2018), and much research has been conducted to establish patterns of motifs in her 
work (Carscallen 1993; DeFalco 2018; Howells 1998, 2009; Martin 1987; Thacker 1998, 
1999), my intentions are to approach the death of children in Munro’s literature from the 
standpoint of her biography and discern recurrent elements that combine in the narrative to 
provide variations, and to ultimately support the much discussed autobiographical aspect of 
her writing (Howells 1998; Howells 2016; Palusci 2017; Redekop 1992; Ross 2020; Thacker 
1988). In this regard, the Maitland River of Munro’s childhood and youth is an endless 
source of life and inspiration that endows her narrative with mystery and adventure – as 
admitted by the author herself (quoted in Thacker 2018) – but remains a double-edged 
sword that feeds but drowns the surrounding fields and towns. It “conveys a prehistoric sense 
of flood and the possibility of either genesis or fearful sinking death” (Rasporich 1990, 133), 
and it is thus unsurprising that water and in particular drowning appear so often in her 
fiction (de Papp Carrington 1997). In a similar line, the author’s idiosyncratic narrative has 
been compared with the photographic image because of its dichotomic and paradoxical 
nature (York 1988), which establishes “the pure relation of that which is to that which no 
longer is”, freezing a moment of life while becoming “the effigy of death” (Barthes quoted in 
Rancière 2011, 39). On a different level, like visual art, in Munro’s fiction, the objectively and 
accurately portrayed reality is broken by an outbreak of emotion (Howells 1998); it has the 
capacity to “immerse us in sensation” (Thomas 1999, iix), construing “delicate moment[s] of 
exposure” (York 1988, 21) which share the sensorial qualities of photography, and which try 
to provide order or explain a paradoxical and unruly reality difficult to comprehend. Munro’s 
Iris Lucio-Villegas 
Spillard
“Honey, Where Are 
the Kids?”: Motifs 
of the Past, Water, 
and Photography 
in Munro’s …
31ARTICLES
finesse lies in the fact that, in stories about childhood, she achieves this photographic-like 
portrayal of the ambiguities of existence with the retrospection and hindsight of adulthood 
– jumping backwards and forwards in time to create her subjective understanding of the 
picture – while still managing to leave intact the baffling components perceived by the child. 
The following sections explore six of Munro’s stories, which, I argue, stem from personal 
experience, to find patterns of coherence, outlining stylistic and thematic components – 
autobiography, the death of children, water, and photography – integrated in the writing to 
construct a sense of déjà vu for the reader (Bigot 2017). In this respect, Sheila Munro’s memoirs 
Lives of Mothers & Daughters: Growing Up with Alice Munro (2001) and Robert Thacker’s 
biography, Alice Munro: Writing Her Lives (2005), anchor the biographical component of 
my argument.1 Nevertheless, despite foundations in previous literature on Munro, short 
fiction and photography theory, this exploration remains personal and subjective and aims to 
advance my own interpretation of child death in the author’s work.
2 Elements in Munro’s Stories Featuring a Child’s Death
To start at the beginning is to confront the last of Munro’s work, “Finale”, the quartet of 
stories in Dear Life that concludes the author’s literary career and which she introduced in 
semiautobiographical terms as “the first and last – and the closest – things” (2013, 255) to be 
said about her life. Yet the events and themes of these four childhood pieces echo her previous 
work (Bigot 2017; Lucio-Villegas 2021; Ross 2020) which, in many instances, reads as their 
initial revisitation in fiction. As insightfully pointed out by Corinne Bigot in her 2017 essay 
“Ghost Texts in Alice Munro’s Stories”, in “Night”, the second story in “Finale”, the adult 
narrator remembers her childhood self being persecuted at night by the thought that she 
would strangle her sister, and this acknowledged reminiscence, the scenario of a child killing 
a child, haunts Munro’s fiction from the beginning to become a theme she approaches from 
various perspectives, employing different narrative devices in stories which could be loosely 
described as potential fratricides and sororicides: “The Time of Death” in Dance of the Happy 
Shades (1968), “Monsieur les Deux Chapeaux” in The Progress of Love (1986), “Child’s Play” in 
Too Much Happiness (2009), and “Gravel” in Dear Life (2012).2 In parallel, water as a medium 
of death also appears from the start of Munro’s work. In “The Time of Death”, from Dance 
of the Happy Shades, Patricia, the precocious nine-year-old protagonist, accidentally kills her 
mentally disabled brother Benny with boiling water while cleaning unsupervised, although 
readers are given no details of the accident itself. She is unable to understand the seriousness 
of her action and remains unaware of the guilt that may assail her, blocking her grief – “with 
her it was as if nothing had happened” (2011, 97) – until Benny’s mythical innocence comes 
to haunt her in the figure of Brandon, the wandering scissors-grinder who fascinated the 
little boy, unlocking her emotions into a screaming fit (Carscallen 1993; Ventura 2015). 
Furthermore, Patricia’s suspended emotional tension proceeds alongside an unseasonal lack 
of snow, as readers are reminded throughout the narrative, and Brandon’s release of Patricia’s 
grief in turn finally precipitates the snowfall in the final paragraph (Smythe 1992): “The snow 
1 Sheila Munro was born in 1953 and is the eldest daughter of Jim and Alice Munro (S. Munro 2001).
2 Later editions have been used to write this paper. 
32 Iris Lucio-Villegas Spillard “Honey, Where Are the Kids?”: Motifs of the Past, Water, and Photography in Munro’s …
came, falling slowly, evenly, between the highway and the houses and the pine trees, falling 
in big flakes at first and then in smaller and smaller flakes that did not melt on the hard 
furrows, the rock of the earth” (A. Munro 2011, 99), in a description evoking the stillness of 
a photograph and condensing Munro’s entire story behind it (York 1988). 
This inferred process, a photograph as an “inexhaustible invitation3 to deduction, speculation, 
and fantasy” (Sontag 2019, 24) prompts the storyline of “Epilogue: The Photographer”, in 
Lives of Girls and Women (1971), a story which, according to Munro’s biographer Robert 
Thacker, “encapsulated not only her own life’s detail – seen and imagined – but also the 
very sensibility that had made her the writer she had become” (2005, 213). In the story, a 
photograph of Marion Sheriff, a young girl who drowned herself by walking into the Wawanash 
River in Jubilee, fascinates Del, the teenage narrator, into trying to piece together in her mind 
a novel about the girl’s family. What is known of the unhappy events surrounding Marion’s 
family – “Well, there is a family that has had its share of Tragedy!” (A. Munro 2015, 307) – is 
insufficiently dramatic for Del, who fashions its members and the reasons for the girl’s suicide 
into a more Gothic and satisfying version of reality (Carscallen 1993). Thus, she creates a 
character, The Photographer, who, like Del, manipulates through his art the world around 
him, distorting his subjects into their “unusual, even frightening” potential future selves, so 
that “[p]eople saw that in his pictures they had aged twenty or thirty years”. In consonance 
with the romantic notions of a teenage girl, Caroline – Marion in Del’s novel – falls in love 
with the photographer and carries his child until “[o]ne day (when she could already feel 
her womb swollen like a hard yellow gourd in her belly), she found the car overturned beside 
a bridge, overturned in a ditch beside a dry creek. It was empty. He was gone. That night 
she walked into the Wawanash River” (A. Munro 2015, 311). The photographer is an agent 
of death (Barthes 1993; Smythe 1992), both through his escape – note the dry creek – 
which triggers the girl’s demise, and by the very nature of his art, “transmuting, in an instant, 
present into past, life into death”, “enlarging the familiar iconography of mystery, mortality, 
transience” (Sontag 2019, 76, 72). In this regard, it seems apt that Marion’s photograph 
enchants Del because it conceals the mystery of her death (York 1988); it provides a clean 
slate on which to create her own fictionalised version of the past, something Munro also does 
in her work, although with the hindsight and distorted memory of adulthood (Palusci 2017; 
Redekop 1992; Regan 1991; Thacker 1988). 
As indicated by many critics (Carscallen 1993; Froud 2017b; Heble 1994; Martin 1987), this 
distorted memory is acknowledged in the linked reminiscences of “Miles City, Montana”, in 
The Progress of Love, which is based on the near drowning of Munro’s four-year-old daughter 
Jenny in 1961 (S. Munro 2001; Thacker 2005). In the story, the adult narrator remembers 
in the first line how “[m]y father came across the field carrying the body of the boy who had 
drowned”, although “I don’t think I really saw all this” (A. Munro 2007, 84). At the boy’s 
funeral, the narrator recalls how, as a child, she “felt a furious and sickening disgust” at the 
sight of her parents that “could not be understood or expressed” (A. Munro 2007, 86). It is a 
photograph that elicits this memory and the main recollection of the story, the near drowning 
of her daughter in a swimming pool twenty years later: “Andrew took a picture of me standing 
3 “Invitations” in the original in plural. 
33ARTICLES
beside the car. I was wearing white pants, a black turtleneck, and sunglasses. I lounged against 
the car door, canting my hips to make myself look slim” (A. Munro 2007, 87). The main 
story describes the family’s car trip to visit the children’s grandparents. They stop in Miles City, 
where the children take a dip in the local pool, although it is closed for lunch and the parents 
are not allowed in. The mother wanders off looking for something to drink when she has a 
premonition, “Where are the children?” (A. Munro 2007, 103), and through a hole in the fence 
sees her eldest daughter, Cynthia, “standing about waist-deep in the water, fluttering her hands 
on the surface and discreetly watching something at the end of the pool, which I could not see. 
I thought by her pose, her discretion, the look on her face, that she must be watching some 
byplay between the lifeguard and her boyfriend. I couldn’t see Meg” (A. Munro 2007, 100), the 
younger daughter. The mother calls out and Meg is saved by her father from the “treacherous 
clear blue water” (A. Munro 2007, 102), even though as admitted by the narrator again, there 
is a certain degree of invention in her recollection of the event. “Miles City, Montana” narrates 
the experiences of “the loss and near loss of a child” (Froud 2017b, 130) by drowning, both 
acts of remembrance triggered in the story by a family photograph. In turn, this sparks the 
protagonist’s “mental pictures of the present and the past” (Sontag 2019, 25), a fictionalised 
version of a true event in Munro’s family history, adapted to explain the dual and contradictory 
nature of water, sex and life, a child’s realisation and comprehension that living and procreation 
entail guilt and death (Carscallen 1993; Froud 2017b; Heble 1994, 2009; Ross 1992). It 
dawns on this narrator that her disgust at her parents is justified because they implicitly “gave 
consent to the death of children and to my death not by anything they said or thought but by 
the very fact that they had made children – they had made me. They had made me, and for 
that reason my death” (A. Munro 2007, 103). 
This bifocal perspective of adult and child narrators (Burszta 2016; Guignery 2015; 
Hoy  1980) becomes more complex in “My Mother’s Dream”, in The Love of a Good 
Woman (1998), which is based on a recurrent and haunting dream Munro had after the 
death of her second daughter Catherine, fourteen hours after her birth (S. Munro 2001; 
Thacker 2005). Munro’s daughter Sheila explains how “[t]here are no photographs of my 
mother when she was pregnant with Catherine, and the death was something she rarely 
mentioned” (2001, 43), although Alice Munro pours this memory into a narrative that 
unites the voices of mother and daughter (Sutherland 2018) and fictionalises its conclusion 
to a happy ending. Told from the adult viewpoint of the surviving baby, who implicitly 
and complicitly shares her mother’s recollection of the unfolding events, the story starts 
with the mother’s dream: “During the night – or during the time she had been asleep – 
there had been a heavy fall of snow”, but things soon start to go amiss since “[s]now had 
settled overnight on the luxury of summer. […] Also, everybody had gone away – though 
she couldn’t think who ‘everybody’ was” (A. Munro 1999, 293). The dream drifts into a 
nightmare when the mother recalls who this “everybody” is and “remembered that she 
had left a baby out there somewhere, before the snow had fallen. Quite a while before the 
snow had fallen. This memory, this certainty, came over her with horror. It was as if she was 
awakening from a dream”. The guilt and grief that ensue follow a recognition that the infant 
“would be dead, shrivelled and brown, its head like a nut, and on its tiny shut-up face there 
would be an expression not of distress but of bereavement”, an extension of the mother’s 
feelings rather than “any accusation of her” (A. Munro 1999, 294), and that “[t]here would 
34 Iris Lucio-Villegas Spillard “Honey, Where Are the Kids?”: Motifs of the Past, Water, and Photography in Munro’s …
never be any room in her for anything else. No room for anything but the realization of 
what she had done”. The dream’s ending, like the ending of the story that unfolds once the 
mother wakes up, is full of relief: “What a reprieve, then, to find her baby lying in its crib. 
[…] Red hair like her own, on her perfectly safe and unmistakable baby. The joy to find 
herself forgiven” (A. Munro 1999, 295). One cannot but wonder at the implications of 
“My Mother’s Dream” in terms of Munro’s biography and interpret the story as an exercise 
of reconciliation with the death of her child where the conceptual nature of water, in this 
case snow, is exploited as a “symbol of the feminine and the  unconscious” (Rasporich 
1990, 134), an element intrinsic to female fertility, which carries life and death. In fact, 
in the narrative perspective, the voice of the child merges with the mother’s memories to 
omnisciently develop the story, unifying the two, as they were during pregnancy, in one 
consciousness and body to find reconciliation (Sutherland 2018).
Disturbingly, in “Child’s Play”, from Too Much Happiness, preteens Marlene and Charlene 
drown Verna, a Down syndrome girl, at a summer camp; the shadow of Verna’s murder 
haunts the two adult females in different ways and unites them in their individual search 
for reconciliation with their deed. Much has been written about the story highlighting 
Verna’s disability and/or analysing Marlene’s – the protagonist and narrator’s – unfelt guilt 
(Darroch 2018; Duncan 2011; Sutherland 2018; Warwick 2018), yet the plot line leading 
to the latter’s confession, the raw and graphic description of Verna’s killing, is condensed in 
images that plague her to disclosure, “uncovering a hidden truth, conserving a vanishing past” 
(Sontag 2019, 59) that she is unable to fend off, as she points out at the beginning of the story 
(A. Munro 2010, 188–89): 
For a long while the past drops away from you easily and it would seem automatically, 
properly. Its scenes don’t vanish so much as become irrelevant. And then there’s a 
switchback, what’s been all over and done with sprouting up fresh, wanting attention, 
even wanting you to do something about it, though it’s plain there is not on this earth 
a thing to be done. 
In this sense, Munro’s “paradoxical combination of power and powerlessness, secrecy and 
exposure experienced by female narrators” (Howells 1998, 142) remains a contradictory 
pursuit to control the uncontrollable past, which, like photography, employs retrospection 
and voyeurism in its exposition (de Papp Carrington 1989). Indeed, the feelings that 
ultimately trigger the murder are underpinned by the power Marlene confers on Verna, partly 
due to a lack of understanding of her syndrome and behaviour, since
only adults would be so stupid as to believe she had no power. A power, moreover, 
that was specifically directed at me. I was the one she had her eye on. Or so I believed. 
As if we had an understanding between us that could not be described and was not 
to be disposed of. Something that clings, in the way of love, though on my side it felt 
absolutely like hate (A. Munro 2010, 200).
Hence, Marlene goes on to dedicate part of her academic career to the justification of this 
hate and publishes a book, Idiots and Idols, which describes how different cultures assign to 
“mentally or physically unique” people “a good deal that is remarkable, even awesome […]. 
35ARTICLES
And what was interesting was to discover a certain amount of veneration as well as persecution, 
and the ascribing […] of quite a range of abilities, seen as sacred, magical, dangerous, or 
valuable” (A. Munro 2010, 210). For she ultimately needs to explain to herself the emotions 
that drove Verna’s drowning and murder, the jubilation felt at winning a child’s inexistent 
battle: “Charlene and I kept our eyes on each other, rather than looking down at what our 
hands were doing. I don’t think we felt wicked, triumphing in our wickedness. More as if 
we were doing just what was – amazingly – demanded of us, as if this was the absolute high 
point, the culmination, in our lives, of our being ourselves” (A. Munro 2010, 222). 
As pointed out by Susan Warwick (2018), this story expands on “The Time of Death” and 
shifts the viewpoint from the third person to the first, focusing on the psychology and guilt 
of the killer rather than on the questionable responsibility of the child. In between these two 
stances, “Gravel” – included in Dear Life, Munro’s last collection of short stories – operates 
again in the ambiguous territory of memory and culpability, although, in this case, the 
narrator cannot be held ethically accountable for the murder of his/her sister. In the story, the 
protagonist inhabits a kind of “no man’s land”, obsessed with the ascertainment of his/her 
involvement in the self-inflicted death of the older sibling, Caro. In accordance with this state 
of mind, the narrator remains throughout the narrative unnamed, ungendered, of unspecified 
age, as he/she unfolds a confusing and vacillating account of the events surrounding Caro’s 
death, a life he/she “can barely remember” (A. Munro 2013, 91), for the reality of the 
moment itself escapes him/her. The events approaching the scene are clear enough: two 
children playing outside their trailer by a gravel pit, their dog Blitzee for company, while 
their mother and newly acquired stepfather have sex inside; then, Caro giving instructions, 
“I was to go back to the trailer and tell Neal and our mother something. That the dog 
had fallen into the water. The dog had fallen into the water and Caro was afraid she’d be 
drowned” (A. Munro 2013, 102), although the rest is unclear:
In my mind I can see her picking up Blitzee and tossing her, though Blitzee was trying 
to hang on to her coat. Then backing up, Caro backing up to take a run at the water. 
Running, jumping, all of a sudden hurling herself at the water. But I can’t recall the 
sound of the splashes as they, one after the other, hit the water. Not a little splash 
or a big one. Perhaps I had turned towards the trailer by then – I must have done 
(A. Munro 2013, 102). 
The following events are also sketchy and full of uncertainty in the memory of a child who 
is too young to go to school, and who grows up afflicted by his/her guilt and responsibility 
in Caro’s haunting death, although his/her subconscious provides a different version, one in 
which blame and attribution do not exist:
When I dream of this, I am always running. And in my dreams I am running not 
towards the trailer but back towards the gravel pit. I can see Blitzee floundering around 
and Caro swimming towards her, swimming strongly, on the way to rescue her. I see 
her light-brown checked coat and her plaid scarf and her proud successful face and 
reddish hair darkened at the end of its curls by the water. All I have to do is watch and 
be happy – nothing required of me, after all (A. Munro 2013, 102–3).
36 Iris Lucio-Villegas Spillard “Honey, Where Are the Kids?”: Motifs of the Past, Water, and Photography in Munro’s …
The scene itself is elusive, a secret photograph hidden by the lethe of childhood, which 
contains a “delicate balance of concealment and revelation”, where the drowning yet again 
“suggests immolation in the ugly feelings of the past” (York 2018, 211) and continues to 
torment. For acceptance of oblivion is unacceptable, and the one image that would appease 
is unreachable: “But, in my mind, Caro keeps running at the water and throwing herself in, 
as if in triumph, and I’m still caught, waiting for her to explain to me, waiting for the splash” 
(A. Munro 2013, 109). 
3 Discussion and Conclusions
As argued, the stories analysed in this paper surface from Munro’s personal experience. “The 
Time of Death”, “Child’s Play” and “Gravel” can be linked to Munro’s semiautobiographical 
story “Night” in so far as they articulate and explore the potential scenario that oppresses 
its child protagonist, i.e., the capacity to kill another child, from different angles and 
judgements. However, while the narrator’s mind in “Night” is consoled by her father, who 
explains that “[p]eople have those kinds of thoughts sometimes” (A. Munro 2013, 283) 
without necessarily acting upon them, in the previous stories there is a lack of adult presence 
which borders on negligence. In “The Time of Death”, nine-year-old Patricia is expected to 
look after three younger siblings alone for “[t]hree-quarters of an hour at least” (2011, 89); 
she tries to impose cleanliness and “exercise a sense of responsibility in a household where 
this is conspicuously lacking” (Martin 1987, 32), with tragic consequences. In the first few 
lines of “Child’s Play”, Marlene assumes her parents talked about Verna’s drowning, which 
was deemed an accident: “I suppose there was talk in our house, afterwards. How sad, how 
awful. (My mother.) There should have been supervision. Where were the counsellors? (My 
father.)” (2010, 188); however, we later learn that there was some supervision, but that the 
murder happened quickly, in the confusion and excitement of a camp’s last day, and therefore 
passed unobserved. In “Gravel”, the children are told to play outside while their mother 
and her lover have sex, although both adults are fully aware of the dangers of the gravel pit 
“filled to the brim with snow and rain” and “twenty feet deep” (2013, 100). There is an 
implicit accusation of neglect in the circumstances of the deaths – which might otherwise 
have been avoided – yet the negligence provides the stories with a further component in the 
tableau of death, reworking “the frame of our perception and the dynamism of our affects” 
(Rancière 2009, 82), so that readers may also become obsessed with its understanding and 
conception, rereading its description and surrounding details to fully comprehend the props 
involved. It is ironic that the death scene in “The Time of Death” is omitted from the narration 
– Benny’s fatal scalding with boiling water is an ellipsis too horrendous to visualise – while 
in “Child’s Play” it is starkly and graphically described as a conscious act which, like Verna’s 
drowning head, rises up, gasping for air, a truth refusing to be left behind (Ventura 2015; 
Sutherland 2018). In “Gravel”, “the emblematic ghost story that is both haunted by a dead/
undead child and haunted by several ghost texts” (Bigot 2017, 145), the death scene remains 
elusive, the one piece of the puzzle that is missing and would put the narrator’s mind at rest. 
In all cases, the image of death lies at the core of the story, the frozen moment in time stating 
our innocence, vulnerability, and destruction, filling in “blanks in our mental picture of 
the present and the past” (Sontag 2019, 25), glued together by the symbolism of water and 
approached from shifting perspectives. 
37ARTICLES
It is perhaps not surprising that while “Finale”, the author’s final four stories including 
“Night”, was introduced as a “separate unit, one that is autobiographical in feeling, though 
not, sometimes, entirely so in fact” (A. Munro 2013, 255), Lives of Girls and Women, 
published forty-one years previously, initially contained an authorial disclaimer – not 
incorporated in recent editions – which described the narrative as “autobiographical in 
form but not in fact” (Thacker 2005, 211). The final piece in the collection, “Epilogue: The 
Photographer”, conceived originally as a novel titled Real Life, transforms the collection into 
“a portrait of an artist as a young woman” (Thacker 2005, 216) and draws from Munro’s 
childhood and youth, and her own adolescent attempt to novelise a Gothic version of her 
Ontario hometown, Wingham. The writer’s fictional references to photography go hand 
in hand with a writing mode that builds on the recollection of a decisive image, a scene 
where something happened to determine the narrator’s life forever. In these stories the 
crucial event is closely connected with the figure of the lost child, which haunts Munro’s 
biography and fiction: “Something happened here. In your life there are a few places, or 
maybe only the one place, where something happened, and then there are all the other 
places” (A. Munro 2013, 162). 
Curiously, a draft version of “Miles City, Montana” included a stillborn baby, Elizabeth, 
buried in a shoebox, and another baby Elizabeth, who lived less than twenty-four hours 
and was buried in the same way, forms one of the main axes of an unpublished story, 
“Shoebox Babies”, on which the author worked in the 1970s (Thacker 2005, 126). Both 
Sheila Munro and Robert Thacker mention the death of Munro’s daughter Catherine 
and its impact on the author. Catherine was buried in a small box in an unmarked 
grave. Her death haunted Munro so that “[f ]or years afterwards she had dreams about 
a lost baby, dreams about leaving a baby girl out in the rain and forgetting about her” 
(S. Munro  2001,  43), which would finally materialise in “My Mother’s Dream”. The 
author also placed a belated marker on the baby’s grave in 1990 to recognise her existence 
(Thacker 2005, 126). Catherine’s kidney-related medical condition was the cause of her 
death, although her physical appearance made the Munros think she had Down syndrome, 
and they discussed the possibility of finding an institution for her so Alice Munro could 
continue her writing career (S. Munro 2001, 43). 
Although we cannot fully ascertain to what degree all this weighed on Munro’s mind, 
there is a veiled tone of parental guilt and justification in the writing of these stories, 
a combination of uncontrollable elements and circumstances amalgamated to provide 
meaning (Lin 2020), with Munro’s psychology, as a mother and woman, underpinning 
and furnishing her writing so that the figure of the lost child becomes a central theme 
in her fiction. The “afterwardness”, “beforeness”, and intertextuality which group these 
stories together sometimes function on a fictional level, and in other instances work on the 
metafictional plane. The recollective and changing perspective of the adult narrators – not 
included in “The Time of Death” – reverberates from Munro’s biography (Sutherland 2018), 
blending the imagination and memory of the author into the narrative, embedding a set of 
recurring components – her past, the iconography of water, and photography – to shape 
her depiction of children’s deaths.
38 Iris Lucio-Villegas Spillard “Honey, Where Are the Kids?”: Motifs of the Past, Water, and Photography in Munro’s …
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