SOURCE: Keefer, Janice Kulyk. “Bridges and Chasms: Multiculturalism and Mavis Gallant's ‘Virus X.’” World Literature Written in English 31, no. 2 (fall 1991): 100-11.

In the following essay, Keefer discusses the problematic representation of multicultural ideology in the story “Virus X.”

Mavis Gallant's “Virus X” is several different stories all happening at the same time: a story about two young Canadians abroad and the unlikely friendship that develops between them; a story about a sociology thesis that fails to get written due to the incapacitating but ambiguous illness of its author; a story about temporal, spatial, and conceptual dislocations; a story about split subjects that can be read as an allegory of the Canadian sense of self; an homage to Katherine Mansfield; a fairy story, or at least romance, in which the delicate heroine, pining under an evil enchantment, is rescued at the eleventh hour by the most stalwart (if stolid...