Reinventing lives into stories : historical autobiography in Alice Munro's The View from Castle Rock

This article focuses on Alice Munro's short-story cycle The View from Castle Rock and the way the authoress permeates her fiction with historical events and people. The stories revolve around Munro's Scottish family history, taking us back to the 18th century, and are based on journals, letters and research Munro did while visiting the Ettrick Valley where her forebears lived. By exploiting the gap between Scottish cultural markers and their referents in the New World (the United States and Canada), Munro shows that her characters have to reinvent both their selves and the world around them. Munro's statement that she has written about "her self as searchingly as [she] could" points to the autobiographical dimension of her stories. One of the concerns of the present author is to single out the autobiographical elements from Munro's life in the stories, drawing on Munro's idea about her fiction that "there is always a starting point in reality." The present author also wants to accentuate that the past needs (re)interpreting when it is documented, and that the fictional element is inherent in any attempt at recreating the past.