Alfred in Visitors summarizes Alice Munro’s narrative style best: “It’s not a story. It’s something that happened.”Munro’s strength is in her characterization: “She was disgusted with her mother’s callousness, her self-absorption, her feebleness, her survival, her wretched little legs and arms on which the skin hung like wrinkled sleeves.” (Accident)

Munro is also a virtuoso at description:”The trees came down to the shore on both sides of the building. The leaves weren’t quite out here, even though it was May. You could see all the branches with just an impression of green, as if that was the color of the air.” (Hard-Luck Stories) Moments drift in Munro’s prose, echoing a disillusionment with existence; there is a lack of a story arc, a climax, any kind of ending and comes across like the humming of a song, a tune, but nothing concrete.