SOURCE: Grabes, Herbert. “Creating to Dissect: Strategies of Character Portrayal and Evaluation in Short Stories by Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro and Mavis Gallant.” In Modes of Narrative: Approaches to American, Canadian, and British Fiction, edited by Reingard M. Nischik and Barbara Korte, pp. 119-28. Würzburg, Germany: Konigshausen and Neumann, 1990.

In the following essay, Grabes discusses Gallant's strategies for creating character portrayals in her story “Acceptance of Their Ways” and contrasts them with those of Alice Munro's “Who Do You Think You Are?” and Margaret Laurence's “To Set Our House in Order.”

Let me begin with a few theoretical presuppositions. The first one is a restatement of Chatman's position that “a viable theory of character should preserve openness and treat characters as autonomous beings, not as mere plot functions.”¹ Considering the illusionary power of literary characters, it may seem unnecessary to say this, but in most structuralist narratology...