How I Met My Husband
Blueprint 1
A Blueprint for Coming of Age
Blueprint 2 The short story How I Met my Husband is a story about a fifteen year old girl who has a coming of age experience while working for a doctor and his wife. The author, Alice Munro utilizes several literary techniques to convey a very relatable theme, that of young idealized romance and the ironies we learn about these romances as we get older. Munro conveys this theme by utilizing an interesting first person perspective and descriptive language to provide the reader with a mental setting. As the story progresses, the character development employed helps to complete the picture of where the main character belongs in society, and how the other characters in the story help her to understand who she does not want to become when she gets older. Ultimately, the male and female characters and what they symbolize in the story provide a roadmap of the pitfalls that Edie realizes that she would like to avoid in life. The most striking thing about how this coming of age theme is conveyed is the use of first person narrative. However, this story and its theme of coming of age are bolstered by a unique twist on the first person telling of a story. The twist here is that while the story is being told through the eyes of a fifteen year old girl, it is actually also being told, or remembered by that same fifteen year old as an older woman. This interesting technique helps to cement the feeling and theme of “coming of age” because it is being told from both a young and old perspective at the same time. It also adds the quality of perspective, which is what this story is about to a certain degree, the perspective of love as time elapses. What is also interesting is that this technique doesn’t detract or confuse the perspective from which the story is being told, it flows
A Blueprint for Coming of Age
Blueprint 2 The short story How I Met my Husband is a story about a fifteen year old girl who has a coming of age experience while working for a doctor and his wife. The author, Alice Munro utilizes several literary techniques to convey a very relatable theme, that of young idealized romance and the ironies we learn about these romances as we get older. Munro conveys this theme by utilizing an interesting first person perspective and descriptive language to provide the reader with a mental setting. As the story progresses, the character development employed helps to complete the picture of where the main character belongs in society, and how the other characters in the story help her to understand who she does not want to become when she gets older. Ultimately, the male and female characters and what they symbolize in the story provide a roadmap of the pitfalls that Edie realizes that she would like to avoid in life. The most striking thing about how this coming of age theme is conveyed is the use of first person narrative. However, this story and its theme of coming of age are bolstered by a unique twist on the first person telling of a story. The twist here is that while the story is being told through the eyes of a fifteen year old girl, it is actually also being told, or remembered by that same fifteen year old as an older woman. This interesting technique helps to cement the feeling and theme of “coming of age” because it is being told from both a young and old perspective at the same time. It also adds the quality of perspective, which is what this story is about to a certain degree, the perspective of love as time elapses. What is also interesting is that this technique doesn’t detract or confuse the perspective from which the story is being told, it flows
References: Clugston, Wayne R (2010) Journey Into Literature. Published by Bridgepoint Education, Inc. San Diego, CA .