SOURCE: "Being Lonely—Dimensions of the Short Story," in Cross Currents, Vol. XXXIX, No. 4, Winter, 1989–90, pp. 399-401, 419.

In the following excerpt from a longer essay discussing several writers, Jansen analyzes the roles of male characters and the theme of loneliness in Munro's fiction, especially in the story "Wood."

Loneliness in [Raymond] Carver often conveys the sense of leaping into a well, followed by a desperate attempt to break the fall. Loneliness in the work of Alice Munro occurs in a broader context and is more the consequence of a darkly deterministic worldview. The flat, featureless landscapes of her Southern Ontario towns are mirrored in the lives of her depleted but idiosyncratic characters. The spectral and alien lives of the men who inhabit this world appear to her female protagonists as riddles incapable of solution. Married or not, her men are outsiders. With varying degrees of distance, husbands haunt...