Themes

The story of Del Jordan's growth from a schoolgirl in the opening "The Flats Road" to a young woman about to leave the small town of Jubilee for university in "Epilogue: The Photographer," is also the story of a young woman's struggle to establish "connections," a word Munro uses in the broadest sense throughout her fiction.

In large part, this search consists of Del's movement toward a sense of pluralism, an understanding of the complex patterns of existence linking her and the subjective experiences that she "knows" to be "true" and "real" with the mysteries and other possible realities structuring the lives of the individuals around her. It is an endless journey, but what Del comes to appreciate and even celebrate is the omnipresence of the ambiguous and mysterious in what she has long considered to be the knowable, the ordinary, and the everyday.

Del begins her life...