In the following essay excerpt, Carrington discusses the child narrator in "Walker Brothers Cowboy" and other Munro stories.

Just as the emotional core of the group of stories discussed in chapter 2 is defined by the common element of uncontrollability shared by the key metaphors in these stories—the surfacing subterranean stream, the bursting boil, the earth-splitting quake, the erupting volcano, and the sudden irruptive violence of often fatal accidents—a second set of somewhat similar metaphors defines the emotional core of earlier stories. These metaphors associate sexuality and death with each other as a terrifying power loose in the world. This association occurs through the metaphorical definition of this power as fire or electricity. ..

In "Walker Brothers Cowboy," "Images," "Boys and Girls," and the novel, Del, first as a little girl and then as an adolescent, is always the first-person narrator. The little girl in...