Alice Munro Comfort

"Comfort," by Alice Munro, is a short story based on life, death and dying, suicide and religion. With the depth of all four topics, controversial issues arise and compromising situations hold the main character, Nina, at a difficult crossroad. That crossroad is the wants and needs that Nina yearns for. "Comfort" illustrates a ride through what Nina experiences after the passing of her husband and her dire need to get what she wants or at least to obtain comfort. From the beginning of the story the reader is bombarded by the emphasis of different views of comfort. However, Munro develops a sense of what Nina believes her comfort should be and then Nina finds her comfort in an unsuspecting place. In the beginning of the story, Nina is driving
home from playing tennis. When she arrives to the house she discovers her husband, Lewis, has committed suicide. Surprisingly, Nina is not shocked, nor is she in disbelief. Lewis had Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS) and slowly was deteriorating from the disease. Nina and Lewis had discussed suicide before and even agreed to it. "Nina had assumed that she would be present and there would be some ceremonial recognition" (Munro 121). Because Lewis was a proud and stubborn person, he disliked "ceremonial recognition" (121). At this point, Munro explains that shortly before his suicide, Lewis left his teaching job because of the communities' strong wishes to present divine creation in his classroom. Lewis majored in biology and held firmly to his beliefs in evolution. Munro fits the appeal of logos here and Lewis becomes the bearer of logic and reason. After the pressure built up, Lewis resigned. He would rather quit his job instead of swallowing his pride and speak of creationism in his classroom. Teaching was Lewis' comfort. His love for science played a major role in his stance on whether religion should play a role in evolution. Because of his scornful religious views, the primarily Catholic community begins to question his teaching authority. When he loses his job, he loses authority and ground to his disease. His great pride and stubbornness eventually leads to his demise. Only after he loses his job does his disease worsen and he starts showing signs of deterioration. After Nina found his body, she helplessly searches for a last message to give her comfort in the passing of her dear husband. Munro depicts Nina as needing closure to a very significant person, or so Nina thought, in her life. She is disappointed by the absence of some last words from Lewis. Lewis's body is taken to the funeral home where it is accidentally embalmed, then quickly cremated after Nina insists that Lewis wanted to be cremated. Ed Shore, the funeral director, finds a letter in Lewis' pocket and gives it to Nina. At first Nina is relieved that her marriage to Lewis had meaning other than their chats about rationalist ideals. She is hoping the note contains an explanation or maybe a goodbye. Her hopes are crumbled when she reads the satirical verse arguing the creationism in school. At this point Nina is again confronted with compromising her comfort. Although Nina finds comfort in her marriage, Lewis' comes from somewhere else. She now has an opportunity to see that Lewis' comfort zone is his science teaching and when he resigned, he lost that zone. Nina's expectations of a loving good bye letter (what she believes to be her comfort) led her to a disappointment when she found Lewis' letter which does not mention her at all. While Ed brings the ashes to Nina, they converse about the preservation of the body and the existence of the soul.
When Nina asks, "Do you believe in such a thing as souls?" Ed replies with "Yes" and a nod of his head (154). As Nina talks with Ed, she begins to think for herself. Nina has molded herself to Lewis' requirements their whole marriage. Now for the first time, Nina is speaking her mind and discovering the possibility of the soul and the correlation it has with life in general. With this new discovery, Munro presents the reader with the climax. Nina's comfort has finally come through. She is no longer fixated on closure with her late husband's death. Now, her comfort holds true in the present. Munro lets the reader breathe a sigh of relief at this symbolic portion of the short story. Although Nina, does not achieve comfort from Lewis she ultimately receives comfort from within herself. From within herself, Nina finds what she has been looking for, her true character.
Nina carefully takes the ashes along a crossroads out of town. As she throws the "cooling ashes" at the roadside she mixed with emotions. "A sickening shock at first, then amazement that you are still moving…surviving…" (Munro 155) This sentence closes the pathos appeal to the audience. Emotional and full of moving words, it is the plateau, leveled off from suspense of Nina's crossroad. Release of Lewis' ashes also releases her from the role as Lewis' wife and back to
Nina. Through a series of events, Munro relates the proceedings of Lewis' suicide to themes in life, suicide, death and dying and religion. She explains the importance of living life and the emotional roller-coasters that suicide, death and dying and religion take. In addition, Munro's timeless short stories create an insightful journey through the main events in her characters lives. Through the journeys she offers the reader to empathize directly with the characters and to get emotionally involved with the storyline.