“An Ounce of cure” by Alice Munro, is a short fictional story about a young girl from a decent family who gets herself drank for the first time in her life while baby sitting. The theme of the story explores the emotional challenges that young people go through during the adolescent stages and their impacts. The main character begins the story by narration how she was swept off her feet by a boy named Martin Collingwood. The relationship however does not last for along time when martin eventually dumps his girlfriend due to professional reasons. The girl becomes devastated and resorts to drinking her predicament away while babysitting at a neighbor’s house. The author describes this as some emotional self imposed state of suffering and this is because the girl is just but experiencing an emotional phase that would soon go away.
Young people in the adolescence stage have issues with their emotions and they get irritated or offended very easily even over matters that are irrelevant. Many of them however do not realize this as soon as possible and most of the times they end up in problems.“An Ounce of cure” is similar to “No Ones a Mystery” by Elizabeth Tallent in the sense that the main characters in both stories are young naïve girls who get carried away by their emotions thus end up in problems. “No ones a Mystery” is a short story that explores the association between two characters. The two characters, a young girl and a man named Jack get into a relationship with one another but the feeling does not seem to be mutual.
For starters Jack is a married man and when celebrating the girl’s birthday, he gives her a mere old diary as a gift. The visions of the girl and those of Jack are totally different. At some point, one may think that the reason why Jack gave the girl the diary was because he wanted her to forget him and maybe write her memories about him in the diary. The girls in the two stories have similar characters in that they both fantasize about men who don’t really care about them. It is also ironic that it is the women who are frustrated in these two stories. In a general perspective, one could think that gender has a lot to do with how individuals treat each other.
The fact that it is the female child in the two stories, who is disrespected and frustrated, raises eyebrows on the critical issue of gender and equality in the society. According to the stories, the male characters do not care an inch about how their girls feel. They treat them with disrespect and worse of all the girls are too young to be exposed to such emotional turmoil. Both stories revolve around the same theme which is mainly not about the behavior of the characters action but the emotional consequences that come with it. The authors in the two stories have used the style of narration in an artistic manner which has contributed enormously to self and personal identity of the characters.
The authors have arranged the distinctiveness of the characters into a unified whole which has helped in developing the true personality of an individual. For instance, Jack and Martin can be said to posses the same character and this also applies to the girls who are both young and happen to be emotionally naive. Following this, the authors therefore have critically used the theory of identity in the two stories. The two stories are also similar in the sense that they bring out the periodic nature of life. The events illustrated in the two stories happen in real life despite the text containing some degree and elements of fiction. Both stories present the challenges that teenagers or adolescents go through in life and the authors bring out their views concerning the matter.
It is again significant to note that the literary techniques of narration and story telling employed in both stories are similar. The stories nevertheless have slight differences and one of them can be seen in the way the stories end. In the story “An Ounce of cure” by Alice Munro has a clear ending in that the girl gets dumped and she seeks refuge in alcohol. In this story, the fate of the relationship is clearly stated and it is therefore obvious to the reader that the character did not end up together. On the other hand, in the story “No Ones a Mystery” by Elizabeth Tallent, the author leaves the readers in some kind of dilemma. It is not clear whether Jack and the girl had a future or not.
Although signs from the character Jack had shown that he surely did not see a future with his girl, the readers do not know exactly what happened at the end. Another difference between the two stories is the fact that Elizabeth’s story has some balance between imagery and dialogue as compared to Alice’s story. This is illustrated in the opening paragraph in “No Ones a Mystery” the author provides a critical description about the inside of Jack’s pickup. Less in imagery has been used in the first paragraph in Alice’s story. Despite these similarities and differences, both stories are intriguing, captivating and above all informative.