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2022, Vol. 19 (1), 81-91(126)
journals.uni-lj.si/elope
https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.19.1.81-91
UDC: 821.111(71).09-32Munro A. 
Gertrud Szamosi
University of Pécs, Hungary
The Human Geometry of Deathscapes and Homes 
in Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock 
ABSTRACT
In her semi-autobiographical collection, The View from Castle Rock (2006), Alice Munro 
claims to portray the history of her ancestors by traveling through time and space and 
putting her fictional self at the centre of the narrative. This paper explores a set of complex 
relationships between space, place, and identity formation with the help of various spatial 
trajectories. At the thematic and structural centre of the narrative there are two recurring 
spatial trajectories that most commonly manifest themselves in the form of deathscapes and 
homes. This paper will map the different deathscapes and homes in relation to their physical 
locations in Scotland, the United States, and Canada, in the timeframe of the past 400 years, 
but more importantly in the context of their fictional meaning and the formative role they 
play in the protagonist’s self-quest.
Keywords: The View from Castle Rock, literary cartography, spatial trajectories, death, home, 
Alice Munro
Človeška geometrija pokrajin smrti in domov v zbirki  
Pogled z grajske pečine Alice Munro
IZVLEČEK
Alice Munro trdi, da v svoji delno avtobiografski zbirki Pogled z grajske pečine iz leta 2006 slika 
zgodovino svojih prednikov, s tem ko potuje skozi čas in prostor in svoj fiktivni jaz postavi v 
središče pripovedi. Pričujoči članek raziskuje kompleksne odnose med prostorom, kraji in 
oblikovanjem identitete s pomočjo različnih potovanj skozi prostor. V tematskem in strukturnem 
središču pripovedi sta dve ponavljajoči se potovanji skozi prostor, ki se najpogosteje kažeta v obliki 
pokrajin smrti in domov. Prispevek bo identificiral različne pokrajine smrti in domove glede na 
njihovo fizično lokacijo na Škotskem, v ZDA in Kanadi v obdobju zadnjih štiristo let, predvsem 
pa v kontekstu njihovega fiktivnega pomena in formativne vloge, ki jo odigrajo na poti iskanja 
identitete posameznih junakov.
Ključne besede: Pogled z grajske pečine, literarna kartografija, potovanje skozi prostor, smrt, 
dom, Alice Munro
82 Gertrud Szamosi The Human Geometry of Deathscapes and Homes in Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock 
1 Introduction
To explore the wide array of complex relationships between space, place, and identity 
formation, in the 1980s a novel field of study emerged, which came to be known as “new 
cultural geography”. The proliferation of recent ideas and texts resulted in a “spatial turn” that 
led to several new discoveries across the fields of humanities and social sciences.1 In his book 
Spatiality, Robert Tally applies the concept of space to the field of literature and identifies 
the term “literary cartography” by comparing the act of writing to “a form of mapmaking” 
and the role of the writer to that of a cartographer (2013, 45). Maps represent geographical 
spaces, areas, and lands by exhibiting their physical features; similarly, literary texts can 
also map and make places and spaces visible. Bushell highlights the inevitably “subjective 
direction” of the process resulting from the “intersection between literature and geography/
cartography (2020, 34), and emphasizes that “literary spatiality” can also be seen as a form 
of “‘human geometry’ that connects humans to each other and to their environment” 
(2020, 24). Although it is often possible to identify textual places on a geographical map, 
literary representations of space or place are not primarily topographical in nature, but more 
importantly, they foreground the vastly complex nature of human experience. This paper 
explores the different spatial locations and their role and meaning by following the narrator’s 
literary journey into her ancestral past. The View from Castle Rock (2006) reconstructs the 
writer’s family history with the help of public records, letters, diaries, and other family 
documents, and offers the perspective of Alice Munro’s fictionalized self.2  
2 Mapping Munro
As an iconic figure in Canadian literature, Alice Munro has also exerted a worldwide influence 
on short story writing that was acknowledged in her award of the Nobel Prize in 2013. The 
“master of the contemporary short story” was born as a Laidlaw, and on her father’s side, the 
family originates from Scotland. The View from Castle Rock is divided into two major parts, 
“No advantages” and “Home,” both of which place on the map a range of spatial locations. 
The title in “No advantages,” by quoting the Statistical Account of Scotland written in 1799, 
provides a matter-of-fact description of the Ettrick parish where the Laidlaws originate. The 
Ettrick Valley lies 50 miles south of Edinburgh and 30 miles north of the English border, 
and “[T]his parish possesses no advantages. Upon the hills the soil is in many places mossy 
and fit for nothing […]. Barley oats and potatoes are the only crops raised. […] There 
are ten proprietors of land in this parish: none of them resides in it” (Munro 2007, 3). 
In stark contrast with the barren location, the place is described as fertile land for stories. 
The reader learns about the home of Michael Scott or Scotus, a twelfth- and thirteenth-
century philosopher and alleged sorcerer, who also features in Dante’s Inferno. This is where 
William Wallace, widely known as Braveheart, once hid, and Merlin was hunted down by 
the local shepherds (Munro 2007, 5). Not only is the place rich in ghost stories and fairy 
tales, but it also boasts notable literary connections. A canonical figure of Scottish literature, 
1 Don Mitchell’s critical volume, Cultural Geography (2020), provides a concise overview of the new field of study.
2 In the Foreword to The View from Castle Rock, Alice Munro self-consciously identifies the main motif of her book 
by claiming, “I was … exploring a life, my own life […] I put myself in the center and wrote about that self, as 
searchingly as I could” (Munro 2007, x). 
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James Hogg,3 became widely known as the “Ettrick Shepherd,” a nickname under which 
some of his works were published; Hogg was a cousin to James Laidlaw.4 The writer’s father, 
Robert Hogg (1729–1820), was a tenant farmer, while his mother, Margaret (1730–1813), 
was known for collecting Scottish ballads. Hogg was a friend to many of the great writers of 
his day, including Sir Walter Scott (Munro 2007, 6). The “narrator-protagonist”5 highlights 
that for several generations her ancestors were shepherds, yet in every family, somebody was 
known for writing letters, diaries, even articles for the famous Blackwood’s Magazine (Munro 
2007, 24). She emphasizes that Scotland was the country where the Scottish Calvinist John 
Knox6 decided that every child should learn to read and write so that everybody could read 
the Bible, and as a result, they became “the best-educated peasantry in Europe” (Munro 
2007, 18). In the beginning of her book, Munro puts her ancestors on the literary map, people 
who, despite originating from a geographically remote and deprived location, possessed an 
abundance of creative inspiration. 
For a long time, space in literary fiction was considered to have no function other than 
“to supply a general background against which the action takes place, something to be 
taken for granted rather than requiring attention” (Buchholz and Jahn 2005, 551). The 
French cultural theorist Michel de Certeau observes in The Practice of Everyday Life that 
the role of stories is similar to that of public transport. He gives the example of modern 
Athens where “the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorei. To go to work or 
come home, one takes a ‘metaphor’−a bus or a train” (de Certeau 1984, 115). Similarly, 
stories also function as vehicles by traversing and organizing places, selecting and linking 
them together; they make sentences and itineraries out of them, they function as “spatial 
trajectories” (de Certeau 1984, 115). Human geography defines the concept of space as 
abstract and universal, in contrast to place as concrete and individual. According to Tuan, 
the difference between “space” and “place” can best be described through the extent to 
which human beings have given meaning to a specific area (1977, 6). It is important to note 
that, despite their different connotations, “space and place are dialectically structured in 
human environmental experience, since our understanding of space is related to the places 
we inhabit, which in turn derive meaning from their spatial context” (Seamon and Sowers 
2008, 44). The following analysis explores the different meanings and the connected and 
interrelated nature of the various spaces and places that feature in The View from Castle 
Rock. At the thematic and structural centre of the narrative there are two recurring spatial 
trajectories that most commonly manifest themselves in the form of graves and homes. This 
paper maps these multiple deathscapes and homes in relation to their physical and temporal 
location, and more importantly in the context of their fictional meaning and the formative 
part they play in the central character’s journey of self-quest. 
3 Scottish poet and novelist, 1770–1835.
4 Adrien Hunter (2010) argues that James Hogg’s best-known work, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified 
Sinner (1824), most likely inspired Munro’s short story “Wilderness Station”. 
5 I have borrowed the term from Martin Löschnigg, who also refers to the first-person narrator in The View from Castle 
Rock as “Munro’s fictional alter ego” (2009, 223). 
6 John Knox (1514–1572), leader of the Scottish Reformation, who set the  severe moral tone of the Presbyterian 
Church of Scotland and shaped the democratic form of government it adopted. 
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3 Deathscapes 
Deathscape is a notional landscape of death or the cultural practices that surround it,7 and 
as such, deathscapes are spaces connected to death, dying, mourning and remembrance. 
Human beings need “lieux de mémoires, symbolic spaces of remembrance […] with their own 
spatio-temporal rules: time stands still and remembrance becomes eternal” (Klooster and 
Heirman 2013, 4). In Munro’s book, deathscapes are burial places occurring in the form of 
cemeteries, graves, or gravestones. They represent and preserve the past in a physical form, 
but in a symbolic sense, they also become spiritual milestones that mark the writer’s journey 
of self-quest as she is following in the footsteps of her predecessors. In spatial terms, The 
View from Castle Rock begins in an Ettrick graveyard in Scotland, and it ends in a Canadian 
cemetery in Blyth, Ontario. The events of the book extend over 400 years, since the narrative 
begins in seventeenth-century Scotland and ends in the present. 
The zero milestone of the story lies in the graveyard of the Ettrick parish church in Scotland, 
where William Laidlaw, the great-great-great-great-grandfather of Munro was born at the 
end of the seventeenth century. The epitaph of the Laidlaw’s ancestor was composed by his 
grandson, James Hogg the writer: “Here lyeth W. L., the far-famed Will o’ Phaup, who for 
feats of frolic, agility and strength, had no equal in his day […]” (Munro 2007, 7). The 
reader also learns that Will established a legendary reputation in the community as a fast 
runner, and a bootlegger by smuggling French brandy (Munro 2007, 10). As the sight of 
tombstones and epigraphs fuels the narrator’s imagination, it recalls the opening scene of 
Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, where the central character of the novel, Pip, visits the 
grave of his parents, whom he never met, and in his childish fantasy he imagines them with 
the help of the inscription on their gravestone. Similarly, in the writerly imagination, the 
character of Will grows into a mythical hero possessing larger-than-life qualities. The narrator 
draws a parallel between the antithetical nature of her ancestor’s character−a near pagan, a 
merry man, a brandy drinker, a man who listened to fairies and to the strict principles of the 
Calvinist faith−and the inherent contradictions of lives past and present (Munro 2007, 17). 
In the course of the collection, graves and gravestones become emotional “gravity centers” 
(Piatti 2009, 181) that mark the stations on a journey that the narrator undertakes to connect 
with her family. The arrival in the Ettrick village turns out to be a disappointing experience, as 
the “conspicuous, out of place, and cold” (Munro 2007, 6) setting compares so unfavourably 
to the dearly familiar landscapes of Canada: 
I was struck with a feeling familiar, I suppose to many people whose long history 
goes back to a country far away from the place where they grew up. I was a naïve 
North American, in spite of my stored knowledge. Past and present lumped together 
here made a reality that was commonplace and yet disturbing beyond anything I had 
imagined. (Munro 2007, 7) 
By staging herself as a naïve outsider−whose ancestors left the “Old World” in the hope of 
finding a better one−the narrator foreshadows the intensity of an emotionally disturbing 
7 I have taken the definition of the WordSense Online Dictionary https://www.wordsense.eu/deathscape/.
Gertrud Szamosi The Human Geometry of Deathscapes and Homes in Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock 
85ARTICLES
journey that, in the larger context of Munro’s fiction, often “reveals a concern with the 
implications of space for identity formation” (McGill 2002, 10).
Graves and cemeteries are, on the one hand, real places, but they are also spaces of reflection 
that through the narrator’s memory, outline broader spatiotemporal attachments between 
geographically and chronologically distant notions. Thus, the title chapter of the book 
connects the family history of past and present by recounting the story of the voyage and the 
emigration of Will’s grandson, James Laidlaw, who makes the move to the new world at the 
unusual age of 60, following the loss of his wife at the birth of their sixth child. The tragic 
death of the wife marks a new beginning for the family, and it is a well-recorded event that 
on June 4th 1818, the Laidlaws, the father, James, his children Andrew, Walter and Mary, 
Andrew’s son and wife, board a ship that takes them to Nova Scotia.8 The voyage was said 
to have been inspired by “the view from Castle Rock”. According to the family anecdote, 
James and his son Andrew climb Castle Rock, the hill where Edinburgh Castle was built, 
and by pointing to the estuary, the father makes the boy believe that in the distance he can 
see America, the country that will one day become their home. The symbolic meaning of 
the scene on the one hand highlights the limited nature of our vision and the way distance 
distorts our perspective and understanding of the world. On the other hand, when our 
vision is blurred, we tend to fill in the invisible or missing content with the help of our 
imagination. Tina Trigg compares the illuminating nature of distance to the act of storytelling 
by observing that spatial and temporal remoteness and displacement fuel the mind’s eye 
and offer new perspectives and meanings (2017, 123). In The View from Castle Rock, the 
writerly imagination becomes an essential structural device that mingles autobiographical 
and fictional elements as it moves between real and fictional locations. The first part of the 
book starts in the Scottish graveyard, and it ends 3357 miles from Ettrick parish, in the 
Canadian graveyard of Boston Church, Esquesing, in Halton County, Ontario, where the 
first Laidlaws and their descendants are buried (Munro 2007, 84–87). The temporal and 
spatial structure of the narrative maps essential connections between past and present, the old 
and the new worlds, and their influence on the narrator’s family. 
Deathscapes have the function of the memento mori, to remind us of mortality, and in 
Munro’s book the concluding chapter, “What Do You Want to Know For?”, expands the 
topic of quest to a more universal theme about the ultimate meaning of life and death at 
a time when the narrator faces the possibility of her own death. The chapter moves along 
two parallel plotlines: one follows the search for an ancient crypt that she once accidentally 
noticed during a yearly cross-country journey, while the other follows the medical search 
for a lump in the narrator’s breast. Side by side with the sighting of the crypt, the doctor 
also sights the narrator’s lump, and as with the many detours that pave the way to the crypt, 
the medical saga also entails several unproductive and postponed examinations. The crypt 
is set in the middle of a small country cemetery, and it looks “[l]ike a big woolly animal-
8 Val Ross claims: “The 12 stories in Castle Rock  are as close as Munro has come to turning her family’s life into 
stories. She uses author James Hogg’s late-18th-century account of her folk, the Laidlaws, of the Ettrick Valley, 
south of Edinburgh. She quotes a Laidlaw diary describing the crossing to Canada in 1818, and selections from her 
father’s novel The Macgregors.” 2006. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books-and-media/eating-and-talking-
at-alices-restaurant/article12674739/. 
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like some giant wombat, lolling around in a prehistoric landscape” (Munro 2007, 316). 
As the narrator and her geographer husband follow the guidance of a geological map, the 
deathscape journey leads them to a prehistoric past, where “[t]he landscape is a record of 
ancient events” (Munro 2007, 318). As the narrator moves beyond the surface and digs 
deeper into the past, her efforts symbolize a profound desire to connect with the eternal, 
enduringly timeless natural formations of the primeval land. Her admiration for the 
“chocolate burgundy color kame moraines that show where a heap of dead ice sat, cut off 
from the rest of the moving glacier, earth-stuff pouring through all its holes and crevices” 
evokes a deeper form of awe for the “wild”, “bumpy” and “unpredictable” surface that has 
“a look of chance and secrets” (Munro 2007, 321). Paradoxically, it is this geologically 
distant landscape that helps to resolve some of the family secrets when the traveller 
eventually discovers the crypt, but more importantly, she attains a deeper form of unity 
when she finds a living witness to her family. The scene when she acknowledges that “I am 
happy to find somebody who can see me still as part of my family” (Munro 2007, 332), 
once again foregrounds the symbolic sense of seeing that testifies to and confirms the 
narrator’s sense of belonging and her rightful membership in the family. In addition to 
spiritual transformation, this life-affirming journey also delivers physical healing, since the 
narrator’s breast lump turns out to be benign. In reference to the title-question of the 
chapter, “What Do You Want to Know For?” Morra notes: “The fact that Munro locates 
her queries and observations about glacial geography extends the nature and implication of 
the question” and “situates human curiosity within larger existential questions about why 
knowing is important and what ends it will serve” (2017, 265).
Deathscapes also form the narrative frame of the collection. As with the opening scene of 
the book in the Ettrick graveyard, the last story recounts the narrator’s search for the grave 
of the immigrant great-great-grandfather, who was known to have died in the United States 
in a place called Joliet, outside Chicago. Even though this search fails to bring the expected 
results, it provides an insightful paradox on the motifs of the narrator: 
We are beguiled. It happens mostly in our old age, when our personal futures 
close down and we cannot imagine – sometimes cannot believe in – the future of 
our children’s children. We can’t resist this rifling around in the past, sifting the 
untrustworthy evidence, linking stray names and questionable dates and anecdotes 
together, hanging onto threads, insisting on being joined to dead people and therefore 
to life. (Munro 2007, 347) 
The words “beguiled,” and “stray,” and the notion of “closing down,” allude to the inevitable 
losses and the general sense of decay and futility that accompany old age, yet the narrator also 
recalls that as human beings, we yearn to belong and “hang onto threads” that connect us 
to our past. In relation to the circular structure of the narrative, Miller concludes that graves 
and cemeteries meld to create a “rare and fascinating work, in which the past makes sense 
of the present and the present makes sense of the past” (2007, 21). In The View from Castle 
Rock, deathscapes on the one hand, serve as epistemological devices in the narrative, but more 
importantly, they also establish spatio-temporal connections between past and present and 
feature as emotional gravity centres along the narrator’s quest for her ancestral past. 
Gertrud Szamosi The Human Geometry of Deathscapes and Homes in Alice Munro’s The View from Castle Rock 
87ARTICLES
4 Homes
In the most general sense of the word, a home is a place where one lives and most commonly 
refers to one’s birthplace or homeland. In addition to identifying home as a place, Mallett 
emphasizes that home is “a space inhabited by family, people, things and belongings […] 
where particular activities and relationships are lived” (2004, 63). Besides being real places, 
homes are also imaginary spaces that provide essential experience for the development of 
identities, selves, and relationships. In the literary use of the word, home is variously described 
“as conflated with or related to house, family, haven, self, gender, and journeying” (Mallett 
2004, 62). The View from Castle Rock reveals several meanings of home in relation to the 
physical location of the family house, the formative experience of home as a haven for gender, 
family relations and marriage, and home becomes a place of origin as well as a point of 
destination (Mallett 2004, 63). 
For most people home is primarily linked to family, and it symbolizes the “birth family 
dwelling” (Mallett 2004, 73); as such, it also signifies family relationships (2004, 74). In 
the narrator’s case the family house was situated on a nine-acre farm and was “an ordinary 
farmhouse” (Munro 2007, 182) with “an unusual location” (2007, 147):
To the east was the town, the church towers and the tower of the Town Hall visible 
when the leaves were off the trees, and on the mile or so of road between us and the 
main street there was a gradual thickening of houses, a turning of dirt paths into 
sidewalks, an appearance of a lone streetlight, so that you might say we were at the 
town’s farthest edges, though beyond its legal municipal boundaries. […] It was 
very seldom that you could see a stretch of country so empty, so seductive to the 
imagination, in our thickly populated farmland. (2007, 147)
The curious location occupies a liminal space that stretches beyond the town limits to the 
countryside of dirt paths yet is also within visible distance from the administrative and 
religious municipal centres. The description of the landscape foregrounds the seductive 
spiritual power the vast emptiness holds on the imagination, and in essence it may also 
symbolize a unique bond between the narrator’s self- perception and the curious topography 
of her family-homeland.
The family home is a “place of intimacy” where human emotions are expressed (Bachelard 
1969, 7); thus, the narrative shift from external to internal places also marks a subjective turn 
in the narrator’s perspective when she recounts memories of her past life. Home is a place 
inhabited by the family and evokes mostly painful memories and many struggles at home 
and in the world outside. We learn that as a girl the narrator “was easily embarrassed […] and 
could never stand up for anybody who was being humiliated” (Munro 2007, 184), including 
herself. Humiliation and shame are images that recur in the context of her most intimate 
relationships with friends and family. The protagonist describes shame as a perpetual feeling 
when “being beaten and of crying from the beating” (Munro 2007, 195), or as she projects 
her self-accusation onto her mother’s allegedly “shameful behavior” because she was so much 
at ease with customers when selling them silver fox fur. As the narrator learns to identify 
herself with her family, she concludes that they “were decent people” (Munro 2007, 195), 
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and she blames herself for having a “self-important disputatious part that had to be beaten 
out of [her]” (194). By the time the narrator is eleven or twelve, the idealized father-figure 
has battered her three or four times (Munro 2007, 194), yet for the protagonist he remained 
“a man of honor and competence and humor, and he was the parent [she] sorely wanted to 
please” (2007, 195). The naïve child-like narrative voice that recounts the chapter “Fathers” 
reveals home to be a storehouse of repressed traumas that lay out a map of the narrator’s 
painful feelings, humiliation, and shame. 
From a child’s perspective, an ideal home is a happy place with good family relationships 
and untroubled marriages. The chapter on “Home” is set at the time when the protagonist 
is nineteen years old and planning to get married. As she looks back on her life and tries 
to find out why she never had any boyfriends before, she reaches the conclusion that to 
become a desirable woman, she needs to get “away from home” (Munro 2007, 258). The 
young woman awaiting the great event of her life is anxious to find a suitable role-model as a 
wife, so she evaluates the various marriages she has witnessed at home, between her parents, 
grandparents and her aunt and uncle. She finds that her parents’ marriage was dramatically 
transformed when the mother developed Parkinson’s disease because of which she “began to 
seem more like his mother than his wife” and the former mother transfigured into an elderly 
relative who needed care and looking after (Munro 2007, 274). The grandparents’ marriage 
was similarly malfunctional, because Grandmother Selina had not married the man she was 
in love with, and the “two of them were said to be as unalike as if they came from opposite 
sides of the moon” (Munro 2007, 275). While gathering these painstaking observations, the 
protagonist recalls the sharp emotional contrast she experienced in the vicinity of Uncle Cyril 
and Aunt Charlie: 
the sense of obligation that grew monstrously around my father and my mother, and 
the stale air of irritability, of settled unease, that surrounded my grandparents−were 
absent from that one marriage, and that this was seen as something to comment on, 
like a perfect day in an uncertain season. (Munro 2007, 278)
The narrator also observes that the most striking aspect of the marriage that felt like “a perfect 
day” was that they “called each other by their first names, no Mother and Dad”, and the 
fact that they did not have any children  “set them apart and linked them together not by 
function, but as their constant selves” (Munro 2007, 277). The narrator’s quest for love and 
companionship ends on the trope of a house in which marriage is compared to “a lighted and 
agreeable room you went into, where you were safe” (Munro 2007, 281). 
The second major structural unit in The View from Castle Rock titled “Home” houses a 
subchapter with the same title that foregrounds the notion of a “a home within a home.” 
The protagonist returns to the family home after the death of her mother at the time 
when the father has remarried and lives in the old house with his new wife, Irlma. On this 
occasion homecoming takes the form of an exceedingly long and trying journey, including 
three separate bus rides. As the trip advances, roads and buses alike become smaller and less 
pleasant, reaching a culmination on an “old school bus with very uncomfortable seats which 
cannot be adjusted” (Munro 2007, 286). As the bus journey gets increasingly cumbersome, 
the narrator develops a growing sense of unease and anxiety that comes to a head when she 
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89ARTICLES
reaches her destination and enters the once familiar home. The description of the house 
exhibits numerous changes: the furniture is new, and so are the carpets and windows, the 
linoleum has been redone, and the old ceiling has been covered up and hidden. With the 
alteration of the original architectural design, the stylish old place has developed an ordinary 
look: “So it seems that this peculiar house−the kitchen part of it built in the eighteen-sixties−
can be dissolved, in a way, lost, inside an ordinary comfortable house of the present time” 
(Munro 2007, 289). The loss and dissolution of the original design mark the new house-scape 
where the reminders of the long-dead mother “are not so easy to locate” (Munro 2007, 290). 
The new family member, Irlma, makes a final assault with a blunt remark claiming that the 
father “wished that she’d always been his wife, and not my mother” (Munro 2007, 300). In 
effect, the stepmother’s sharp pronouncement wipes out the family’s past and the narrator’s 
existence, and evokes a long line of painful memories and old feelings of guilt and regret in 
the character as she struggles to come to terms with her position as the eternal outsider:
Time and place can close in on me, it can easily seem as if I have never got away, that 
I have stayed here my whole life. As if my life as an adult was some kind of dream that 
never took hold of me. I see myself […] like one of those misfits, captives − nearly 
useless, celibate, rusting − who should have left but didn’t, couldn’t, and are now unfit 
for any place. (Munro 2007, 312) 
The protagonist’s desperate attempts to remain in control and her growing awareness of not 
belonging to the family culminate in the scene when the father is taken to hospital with a 
serious heart attack. Having to face the possible death of her remaining parent, the narrator 
realizes that this is not an ordinary visit, as “[t]he buses that run from place to place no 
longer seem so surely to connect with me” (Munro 2007, 311). Thus, the long and tedious 
journey reaches its destination when the middle-aged protagonist comprehends that her 
former home has become a place, a house that “does not mean as much to me as it once did” 
(Munro 2007, 290). This ultimate recognition helps the narrator to relinquish her dream 
for an ideal home and longing for acceptance. The visit turns into an epiphanic “journey of 
self-realization” that highlights “the traveler’s perceptions and the emotional impact of the 
journey on the self” (Botta 2018, 172). When the protagonist finally understands that “it 
was myself that I loved here−some self that I have finished with, and none too soon” (Munro 
2007, 290), the long and painful passage ends on a hopeful note of acceptance. 
5 Conclusion
Through its layering of stories, The View from Castle Rock maps a journey that explores forms 
of connectedness between place and self. Home, as a place of origin and return, structures the 
narrative between the ancestral birthplace of the family in Scotland and the narrator’s family 
home in Canada. The collection in many ways reads like a Bildungsroman recounting the 
protagonist’s journey of self-development from her early teens to middle age and reveals her 
many struggles to find her place in the female line of the family among Grandmother Selina, 
Aunt Charlie, and the ambivalent mother figure. In family histories homes and graves are 
both real and symbolic spaces, which connect times and places of the past to the present, and 
both represent the multi-layered richness of spatial images; this action is similar to the living 
90
universe of fiction, where “space is marked by a myriad of associations and meanings in the 
past, present, and future” (Verraest and Keunen 2013, 35).  
In the epilogue, titled “Messenger,” the disparate family burial places and homes are joined 
in the cemetery of Blyth, in Ontario, where the narrator visits the graves of the rest of her 
family. In the graveyard the storyteller recalls a vivid memory of a house that she once visited 
and where she saw
a big mother-of-pearl seashell that I recognized as a messenger from near and far, 
because I could hold it to my ear−when nobody was there to stop me−and discover the 
tremendous pounding of my own blood, and of the sea. (Munro 2007, 349)
Timelessness and the wonderful feminine symbols of mother and sea confirm the narrator’s 
powerful sense of belonging and connectedness. The “Messenger” also announces Munro’s 
artistic credo, and the ultimate role of the storyteller as a messenger between past and present 
times: a messenger who “has recorded all the names and stories of the different family 
members across the generations and joined them to the living people” (2007, 348).
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