Friend of My Youth

The story of the Grieves sisters is related from two degrees of remove: It is a story that the narrator’s mother tells the narrator, which the narrator then tells the reader. This distance between the narrator and the events of the story she recounts symbolizes the narrator’s lack of access to her deceased mother and emphasizes how the narrator attempts to understand her mother better through indirect means.

The mother boarded with the Grieves sisters when she was a young woman, yet they remain mysterious to her in many ways. She learns from the townspeople, rather than from the sisters themselves, about the scandal of Ellie’s pregnancy and Flora and Robert’s broken engagement. She never learns the origins of Ellie’s illness or Flora’s true feelings about her role as spinster and caretaker. Similarly, the narrator’s mother remains mysterious to the narrator; she attempts to understand her mother better through the telling of this story, just as her mother told the story to try to better understand the Grieves sisters.

Munro creates a metafictional aspect to the story by portraying her narrator as a fiction writer. The narrator is aware of how she actively shapes the story over the course of its telling, and the reader is aware of the artifice of the story and the motivations of the person telling it. Because the narrator has never met the Grieves sisters, and so feels no personal loyalty towards them, she feels free to speculate about their private lives. She has the detachment of a fiction writer and the Grieves sisters become characters in a story that allows the narrator to investigate her own feelings, her mother, and the temperamental and generational differences between the five women of the story.

Even to the narrator’s mother, the Grieves sisters are old-fashioned and eccentric. The narrator’s mother is not religious in the way that the Grieves sisters are, and she has access to and engages with the modernity of her time. However, she still comes from the same small-town world that they do, and so has a proximity to them that would not be possible in a large cosmopolitan city. Munro uses these degrees of proximity to show how her characters change from generation to generation, growing less conservative and embracing or rejecting the philosophical trends of their respective generations. Unlike her mother, who married at a young age, the narrator appears to be single; her career as a fiction writer evinces the distance that she has traveled from her mother’s small-town origins. She is impatient with what she sees as her mother’s sentimentality around Flora, and her supposed goodness and self-sacrifice. She is also bemused by her mother’s silence on the subject of Robert Deal, who to her is “the really mysterious person in the story” (21). She has a modern openness and curiosity about sex that her mother does not have, and a related distaste for old-fashioned politeness and what she perceives as hypocrisy.

However, Munro allows neither the narrator nor her mother to know Flora completely; her character remains unknowable, as does her destiny. This open-endedness extends to the story as a whole. Munro resists narrative resolution—letters go unanswered, characters hide their feelings—while also acknowledging the human drive towards resolution. This is seen in the story’s last paragraph, and particularly in the last sentence: “One of their ministers, in a mood of firm rejoicing at his own hanging, excommunicated all the other preachers in the world” (26). The narrator is referring here to the early Cameronians and to their violent rejection of all other religions, even at their own expense. The sentence recalls other endings and abandonments throughout the story that the characters have initiated and with which they have had to contend. There is Flora’s rejection of the mother’s initial letter, her apparent abandonment of her religion, and the narrator’s own abandonment of her mother’s world. There is also the ultimate abandonment of her mother’s early death, which leaves the narrator with far more questions than answers. Unlike earlier explanations and asides, the narrator does not explain to her reader why she has included these facts about the Cameronians. Instead, the comparison becomes clear through juxtaposition. Just as the Cameronians self-righteously rejected worldly influences, Munro’s characters reject the beliefs of previous generations, preferring to be unknowable rather than conventional. In their own time, the Cameronians thought of themselves as progressives. Through three generations of women, Munro explores the paradox of how one generation’s progressive ideals become what the next generation will rebel against. Additionally, the narrator’s research on the Cameronians emphasizes her search for understanding; she has more access to information about and extreme Scottish Christian sect than to information about her own mother.