Alice Munro's An Ounce Of Cure

Alice Munro’s short story, “An Ounce of Cure,” pertains to a young teenage girl, dealing irrationally with a break up. The setting is in a town, where drinking alcohol is almost considered foreign. The narrator's dad would lightly consume beer on a hot day. As for her mother, she did not join in on the occasion. The narrator is a reliable person who babysits around town. The title of reliability soon changes into irresponsibility after she gets heart broken from a boy named, Martin Collingwood. She continuously cries and was overwhelmed with the relentless idea of him. The narrator constantly tortured her own mind with the repeating thoughts and images of everything that had to do with Martin Collingwood. When Mr. and Mrs. Berryman asked her
She mentions, “most of the people we knew were the same way, in the small town where we lived.” Her mom does not drink alcohol but her dad drinks beer on a hot day.
She indicated that most people in their town did not have anything to do with alcohol. The society of where she lives considers drinking alcohol to be a taboo. This ties to her conflict with the alcoholic beverages. After the incident, the majority of the people in town and the whole school knew what happened with how she “tried to commit suicide over Martin Collingwood.” She had the “most sinful reputation in the whole High School. [She] had to put up with it until the next fall.” Due to the accident that the narrator encountered with herself, the people in town and in school despised her. After becoming sober from getting drunk, the narrator begins to get back to reality. She confesses to her mom and “told [her] everything from the start, not omitting even the name of Martin Collingwood and [her] flirtation with the aspirin bottle, which was a mistake.” She understands the decisions that she made with the aspirin and alcohol bottles. She knows what she did was illogical and irrational thinking can cause harm to her mental and physical health. The moral of the story is that making mistakes helped the narrator learn and overcome her heart break. She now understands that doing harm to herself over a boy is ignorant and not worth the unnecessary