An Ounce of Cure Defined

An Ounce of Cure Defined In Alice Munro’s, “An Ounce of Cure,” a typical teenage girl, after being dumped by her boyfriend, takes drastic actions to forget her emotions and later finds herself face to face with reality. With that feeling of hurt, devastation, and slight bitterness inside of her, she made the decision to get drunk in hopes of forgetting the emotions that suddenly overwhelmed her. Not knowing the outcome of her actions, she quickly becomes aware that she had done wrong. She later would learn from her mistake and become a better person for her decision that ultimately changed the course of her life. The story, An Ounce of Cure, is told by the teenage girl several years after the crisis in which she endured. The narrator appears to be a somewhat typical teenage girl who fell in love for the first time to only find herself heartbroken. It is apparent to the reader from the consistent use of past tense, the level of vocabulary, and the mention of major events such as first love, first dance, and college, that the story is being told looking back on a troubling but yet vital part of her past. Towards the end of her story she states, “I had a glimpse of the shameless, marvelous, shattering absurdity with which the plots of life, though not fiction, are improvised” (Munro, 22). It was on that Saturday night in April in 1968 at the Berryman’s house which whom she baby-sat for often, that the life-altering decision unraveled. The setting in this story is like a timeline of her summer from the breakup to the drunken cascade. Munro plotted the story in such a way that you feel as though you were following the main character through several months of emotions and conflicts; such as seeing Martin Collingwood play Darci in the schools Christmas production of Pride and Prejudice all the way up to the night of the Spring Dance, shortly followed by that forever lasting Saturday night.
The language and tone throughout the story is light and playful, not once

Cited: Munro, Alice. “An Ounce of Cure.” Literature: Craft and Voice. Nicholas Delbanco and Alan Cheuse. Vol. 1. Boston: Mcgraw-Hill, 2010. 16-22. Print. Fiction.