Alice Munro's An Ounce Of Cure

Alice Munro’s short story, “An Ounce of Cure,” pertains to a young teenage girl, dealing irrationally with a break up. The setting is in a town, where drinking alcohol is almost considered foreign. The narrator's dad would lightly consume beer on a hot day. As for her mother, she did not join in on the occasion. The narrator is a reliable person who babysits around town. The title of reliability soon changes into irresponsibility after she gets heart broken from a boy named, Martin Collingwood. She continuously cries and was overwhelmed with the relentless idea of him. The narrator constantly tortured her own mind with the repeating thoughts and images of everything that had to do with Martin Collingwood. When Mr. and Mrs. Berryman asked her
to babysit their kids, she agreed. That night, she digs through the kitchen for a soda, but comes upon three half bottles of alcohol, which she describes as “half full of gold.” She expected the alcohol to soothe her agony. Once she had two drinks, she did not have an upsurge of euphoria. Instead, she found herself lying on the floor, as sick as ever. The Berryman's find her drunk and drives her home. She begins to sober up and realizes what she has been doing is wrong and absurd. Alice Munro writes her short story in the first person point-of-view to better describe the situation within the narrator. It helps the readers understand how the narrator grows as a person and overcomes her heart break. The alcohol bottles that she describes as, “gold” symbolizes a thought of escape and a cure for her pain. While drinking the cup of alcohol, she expected the alcohol to have “some sweeping emotional change, an upsurge of gaiety and irresponsibility, a feeling of lawlessness and escape, accompanied by a little dizziness and perhaps a tendency to giggle out loud.” Instead, her “throat was burning, but ‘she’ felt nothing” except nauseous and sick. When the narrator called Joyce to come help her, Kay Stringer, a mutual friend, came along as well. Kay demanded “Joyce to find the biggest coffeepot they had and make it full of coffee.” Kay told the narrator to chug the coffee in as much as possible. The coffee can be symbolized as a new awakening to the present reality. The narrator was stuck in the past, mourning over the idea of Martin Collingwood and making decisions based on former emotions. The coffee wakes her up and makes her realize that she needs to move on with her life. It makes her aware of the present and of the situation that she got herself into. The main conflict of this short story is man vs self. The narrator struggles with internal conflict within herself. She explains, “I spent perhaps ten times as many hours thinking about Martin Collingwood—yes, pining and weeping for him—as I ever spent with him; the idea of him dominated my mind relentlessly and, after a while, against my will.” Her own conflict is based on how she chooses to handle the situation. She chose to let the thought of her ex-lover consume her inside out. The narrator continues to constantly think about her two month relationship with Martin Collingwood and it destroys her, mentally. She says, “I would torture myself, quite mechanically and helplessly, with an exact recollection of Martin kissing my throat. I had an exact recollection of everything.” The narrator visualizes the memories that she had with Martin Collingwood. She becomes attached to the memories and it was put on replay in her head. She was already dreading the idea of him after seeing him at a school play. With the excessive thoughts of Martin, she was stuck in a fictitious world with him and that only made her yearn for Martin even more. The narrator’s action was foreshadowed at the beginning, starting with how she described the towns lifestyle.
She mentions, “most of the people we knew were the same way, in the small town where we lived.” Her mom does not drink alcohol but her dad drinks beer on a hot day.
She indicated that most people in their town did not have anything to do with alcohol. The society of where she lives considers drinking alcohol to be a taboo. This ties to her conflict with the alcoholic beverages. After the incident, the majority of the people in town and the whole school knew what happened with how she “tried to commit suicide over Martin Collingwood.” She had the “most sinful reputation in the whole High School. [She] had to put up with it until the next fall.” Due to the accident that the narrator encountered with herself, the people in town and in school despised her. After becoming sober from getting drunk, the narrator begins to get back to reality. She confesses to her mom and “told [her] everything from the start, not omitting even the name of Martin Collingwood and [her] flirtation with the aspirin bottle, which was a mistake.” She understands the decisions that she made with the aspirin and alcohol bottles. She knows what she did was illogical and irrational thinking can cause harm to her mental and physical health. The moral of the story is that making mistakes helped the narrator learn and overcome her heart break. She now understands that doing harm to herself over a boy is ignorant and not worth the unnecessary
aching. Within a few days, a majority of towns people had heard about her incident of getting drunk and that she tried to commit suicide over Martin Collingwood. “But here was a positive, a splendidly unexpected, result of this affair: [she] got completely over Martin Collingwood.” With unexpected turn of events on that Saturday night, she feels that she had had “a glimpse of the shameless, marvelous, shattering absurdity with which the plots of life, though not of fiction, are improvised.” The narrator turns these bad actions into a good outcome; resulting to her getting over Martin. Although “it was the terrible and fascinating reality of [her] disaster; it was the way things happened.” Bad things come about but she overcomes it with a positive mindset. She learns from her mistakes and she becomes more emotionally stable. The narrator tells her own story of her first heart break. She is naive to the situation and decides to take unnecessary actions against it. The heartache was temporarily replaced with alcohol which results to more conflict. The dilemmas soon gets resolved after her realization of how petty she was acting. The theme of this story is learning from your past and making a better future out of it. After learning from her experiences, the narrator grows up into a mature young lady who stands up for her own actions. Even though she had obstacles within the past and present, she learns to move on from the troubles and continue to live her life making good choices.