Family Furnishings IOC Outline:

Introduction:

‘Family Furnishings’ is a short story written by Alice Munro. This short story is from Munro’s collection published in 2014, titled ‘Family Furnishings.’ In this short story Munro highlights the intricacies of maturing, exploring the prevalent yet inexplicit theme of coming of age. Munro reveals the burden of becoming an adult and having to carry the ‘family furnishings.’

Sequential Passage Analysis:

This passage is situated after the protagonist attends her father’s funeral, she meets Alfrida’s daughter and finds out that Alfrida did not attend the funeral due to her health problems and old age. The purpose of this passage is to confine the entire story and tie everything together. 

1.     Alfrida’s daughter recalls the story about Alfrida and the protagonist’s father:

a.     “Boy and a girl, they would just get teased something terrible” this foreshadows the incestuous relationship later revealed to have blossomed between the narrator’s father and Alfirda in their youthful years.

b.     “Bells rung.” According to the Bible, Bells ringing may symbolize the sacred union between a man and a woman. Bells also symbolize the start of a new life. The bells allude to the incestuous relationship between Alfrida and the protagonist’s father, and the extra-marital child that was created as a result of the union.

c.      Alfrida’s daughter recalls the story vividly, yet in a manner that is non-identical to the protagonist’s version of it. Here Munro reveals the “power” of words (as stated in line 7). Story telling is always structured in a manner appropriate for its readers.

2.     The protagonist is confused as to the change in the story she was once told about her father and Alfrida.

a.     “Only I thought hey were just children.” The noun ‘children’ symbolizes purity and innocence. In emphasizing the word children, Munro reveals the impurity of the relationship between Afrida and the protagonist’s father.

b.     “She was pretty good at remembering anything involving your father.” This alludes to the emotional attachment and love that Alfrida had for the protagonist’s father.

c.      “People change things around.” Munro discusses the power of words and storytelling once again, people have the ability to mend the truth and change their words in order to protect their selves.

3.     The protagonists finds out that she lived her whole life not knowing who Alfrida truly was:

a.     “She said you were smart, but you weren’t ever quite as smart as you thought you were.” Here the protagonist figures out the true relationship between her father and Alfrida, indicating how she had overlooked the truth through out her life.

b.     “She said you were kind of a cold fish.” This metaphor characterizes the protagonist as an unresponsive individual, oblivious to their surroundings.

This moment in the plot reveal’s that Alfrida and the protagonists father had emotional and sexual relationships in their teenage years. Alfrida’s reputation, her affinity for her father, her removal to another city, and an implausible story of armistice day with which Murno open her tale all allude to this overlooked relationship. Munro connected the dots, yet kept the reader from doing so. In doing so, Munro has emphasized the power of storytelling. Munro tests how we read between the lines.

The Moons of Jupiter- Practice IOC

Hello,

This is the link to my practice IOC. My passage if from a short story by Alice Munro, titled 'The Moons of Jupiter.'

Ed Sheeran ‘Small Bump’

Ed Sheeran is known for his magical hands, which strum the chords of our hearts and fuels us with many emotions.  ‘Small Bump’ is no different; it is a touching tale of the tragic journey to parenthood.

‘Small bump’ starts by Ed Sheeran sharing emotions of love and compassion with the listeners, the excitement that comes with parenthood. We smiled as he smiled at the though of the exciting journey of parenthood. We laughed as we thought about how his baby might look, whether he would the singer’s hair or the mother’s eyes. 

The song ending takes a tragic turn as the listeners find out that the baby has been ‘torn from life.’ The songwriter grieves the loss of his child and through his portrayal of his baby’s departure as being ‘torn’ from life by God, it is evident that the songwriter holds feelings animosity and blames God for his pain. This vivid image evokes emotions of sadness: an innocent child aggressively torn from the hands of his loving parents.

I personally have never experienced the attachment a parent feels towards his/her child; I don’t understand the eternal selflessness and love that parent are capable of. However, Ed Sheeran has crafted a tale in which he took us through the events of loving and expecting an unborn child and then grieving the child’s loss.  

You were just a small bump unborn, in four months you're brought to life

You might be left with my hair, but you'll have your mother's eyes

I'll hold your body in my hands be as gentle as I can

And now your scan on my unmade plans

Small bump, in four months you're brought to life

I'll hold you tightly, I'll give you nothing but truth

If you're not inside me, I'll put my future in you

You are my one, and only

You can wrap your fingers round my thumb and hold me tight

Oh you are my one, and only

You can wrap your fingers round my thumb and hold me tight

And you'll be alright

You're just a small bump unknown and you'll grow into your skin

With a smile like hers and a dimple beneath your chin

(Oh) Finger nails the size of a half grain of rice

And eyelids closed to be soon opened wide a small bump

In four months you'll open your eyes

I'll hold you tightly, I'll give you nothing but truth

If you're not inside me, I'll put my future in you

You are my one, and only

You can wrap your fingers round my thumb and hold me tight

Oh you are my one, and only

You can wrap your fingers round my thumb and hold me tight

And you'll be alright

You can lie with me, with your tiny feet when your half asleep

I'll leave you be

Right in front of me for a couple weeks

So I can keep you safe

'Cause you are my one, and only

You can wrap your fingers round my thumb and hold me tight

Oh you are my one, and only

You can wrap your fingers round my thumb and hold me tight

And you'll be alright

You were just a small bump unborn, for four months then torn from life

Maybe you were needed up there but we're still unaware as why

In what ways could Wallace’s theory about education be applicable to the writing of Alice Munro? Justify your conclusion.

The ability to see beauty in what is often overlooked is something both Munro and Wallace have in common.

In his essay, ‘This is Water’, Wallace discusses humans’ inability to understand their “most obvious, ubiquitous, important realities.” People over indulge in abstract realities, they often find themselves living their whole life in those abstract realities rather than in the real world. By abstract realities, I am referring to the pessimistic voice inside all of our minds, the ones we fail to ignore. Humans live their whole life seeing through the ‘water’, yet failing to acknowledge its vitality. We do not think of what lies in the heart of living: it is coming to terms with the fact that there are individuals other than ourselves in this world struggling and trying to survive in their own way. To live in serenity, we must learn to feel for one another and we must learn how to coexist. Wallace’s educational theory is that the liberal-arts cliché about ‘learning how to think’ is one that is far too often trivialized. Do not become “a slave to your head” and learn how to truly think for yourself. Wallace reminded me that despite having spent the majority of my life in a classroom, I have yet to learn how to think, how to truly think for myself.

Wallace’s prominent theory in his essay is that true freedom is acquired not from knowledge, but rather from being able to exercise control over how and what you think. We must acknowledge that the world does not revolve around us (as individuals). If this is not achieved, we will become slaves to our own thoughts and to the thoughts instilled into our brain by others. One’s inability to connect to other people enables feelings of isolation and depression to burgeon. Wallace states that to live a happy life, we must be able to connect with people through interpersonal intelligence: the ability to connect with other people through verbal and non-verbal means.

Munro and Wallace alike see the value in interpersonal intelligence. Munro’s writing, although anti-climatic, enables the readers to build emotional connections to her characters: empathy, sympathy and compassion. At the core of Munro’s short stories is the study human psychology. Like Wallace, Munro sees beauty in human relationships. In his essay, Wallace provides his reader’s with the grocery store anecdote, saying that spending an afternoon in a crowded grocery store is tedious to many of us. We begin to blame others for our misfortune. However, he states “It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, loud, slow, consumer-hell-type situation as not only meaningful but sacred, on fire with the same force that lit the stars — compassion, love, the sub-surface unity of all things.” Similarly, Munro crafts stories such as ‘Passion’ in which the plot is far too enigmatic to be fathomed without a basic understanding of emotional intelligence. Munro creates  the character Grace: a young woman who builds her relationships solely on the need to satisfy her emotional needs, making them susceptible to a tragic ending. Munro enables the readers to live in the character’s mind. The readers become sympathetic towards Grace’s character and despite her sinful acts of emotional infidelity and her selfish actions, the readers see how her family history has impinged upon her personality. Munro enables the readers to see the world in colour: life is not in black and white, people are not distinctly good or bad. Every aspect of living has a different fusion of good and bad, yet it is easy for us the see the bad and overlook the good.

One must be aware of their internal state of mind, there is no doubt that humans must be emotionally stable in order to lead a successful life. However, emotional intelligence is just as important. After all, we are social beings and in order to secure the void we develop in isolation, we must learn how to connect with others and truly think for ourselves.

The importance of emotional intelligence in our lives has been emphasized by many philosophers. Aristotle famously stated “Man is by nature a social animal; an individual who is unsocial naturally and not accidentally is either beneath our notice or more than human. Society is something that precedes the individual. Anyone who either cannot lead the common life or is so self-sufficient as not to need to, and therefore does not partake of society, is either a beast or a god.” Furthermore, Abul 'Ala Al-Ma'arri, an Arab poet and philosopher once said “الناس للناس من بدو ومن حضر  …  بعض لبعض وإن لم يشعروا خدم”  meaning that humans are naturally social beings, and thus they must set their social and political differences aside in order to coexist. Humans must be able to empathize with one another, they must be able to understand that the world in which they live is not their own.

Emotional intelligence is an ostracized ability. It is a universal language, enabling us to feel in tune with all of humanity.