Alice Munro's An Ounce Of Cure

There are two things that are very well known and undeniable in this world: teenagers are complex, and teenage girls are even more complex. When one becomes a teenager, they are trying to find themselves. They have it rough, and adults usually do not understand. Being a teenager means the introduction to deeper relationships, whether it is with a partner, friends, or work-related. It also means heartbreak, confusion, and deep contemplation about life itself. The main character in the short story “An Ounce of Cure” deals with just those things. She goes through heartbreak, and she handles it like any other teenage girl would. The author, Alice Munro, depicts her in a way that Munro portrays all the characters in her stories, or so the way she …show more content…
The girl was so focused on Martin that she did not even think about anything else, so, when she started looking for ways to cope with her depression, her attention shifted. She was looking for a way to heal her broken heart, and she somewhat found it. During this transition, Munro shows the evolution from the girl’s innocence to desperation for a cure. The author focuses on the interior life of the girl, and she shapes her into someone who begins to tests life’s boundaries and turns to new things for hope (Teitelbaum). The girl soon found clarity at the bottom of the bottles. Although she did not find it directly, she eventually did after the incidents took place, “… I got completely over Martin Collingwood… What was it that brought me back into the world again? It was the terrible and fascinating reality of my disaster; it was the way things happened.” (Delbanco 158). On top of all of the struggles of the occurrences, she had to go through even more misery at school. When her school found out what she did, she was in the limelight, and she was finally able to perceive the situation through everyone else’s. She turned her attention to what her peers were saying instead of her broken heart, and she was new to people talking about her, so she was uncomfortable. She had to adapt to all the eyes and all the whispers; she had to hear …show more content…
The author expresses that the girl is just like any other her age when learning from her experiences, “Her narratives spring from an imaginative, intelligent and unpretentious individuality to which fiction is a natural recourse.” (Conron 109-123). The girl was not effected immediately, but once the incident was over and once she could feel the tension from her mother’s disappointment along with the impact of being the center of attention for the wrong reasons at school, she began to realize what she had done. It was the night of intoxication that saved her, “… she changes and matures after her horrible drinking experience. She faces the problem of accepting who she is and learning to live in the present and make good choices. She is able to survive that Saturday night and make a new beginning.” (Bhattacharjee 1917). The other things did not matter as much- she had to feel it within herself. It did not help, however, that her mother was awfully upset with her and her school was saying harsh things about her behind her back. Her mother was a traditional, conservative woman who did not drink, so one could imagine the disappointment she felt when she witnessed her intoxicated daughter. The narrator, of course, felt relatively ashamed for the way she acted during the whole ordeal and for upsetting her mom. Her peers were cruel, but she was even effected for the better when she became the talk of the

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