In the following essay excerpt, Dahlie focuses on "the recurring isolation and rejection pattern" in Munro's stories, identifying the "fear of disintegration of self' present in Ben's daughter.

Up to a point, it is meaningful to divide Alice Munro's characters into two categories—the secure and the insecure, or the adjusted and the maladjusted, or the accepted and the rejected—but a more than superficial examination reveals that these oppositions are quite inadequate to explain their real natures. Mrs. Munro's world is neither consistent nor readily comprehensible; and as the reader struggles with its many paradoxes, contradictions, and ambiguities, he finds himself compelled to reassess characters and their motives, and ultimately to realize that "normal" characters in the conventional sense rarely exist in this world. On the surface, much seems straightforward—family relationships, ordinary friendships, love affairs—but there is always something gnawing...