Analysis Of Alice Munro's 'The Bear Came Over The Mountain'

Life tends to progress in a linear fashion, from start to finish, infancy to old age, birth to death. Within a lifetime there is the progression, accumulation of experience, understanding, knowledge, memory, and relationships all shaping one’s identity, understanding of one’s self and one’s place in the world thus giving meaning to life. Alzheimer’s disease impedes that linear process; when memories are lost or when the capacity to form new memories vanishes an important link to the content of one’s own identity can be lost too. The story by Alice Munro The Bear Came Over the Mountain and the film Away from her directed by Sara Polley both depicted the poignant aspect of Alzheimer’s disease, concurrently exploring the ways in which one’s life is affixed by love and relationships and how the unmooring such as the loss of shared memories which accompanies Alzheimer’s disease as seen in both works affects not just those who have lost their memories …show more content…
The screenplay is also true in sticking to the same narrative as Munro's story only with a little more detail. The film engages it’s viewers with the characters, revealing their flaws without losing the viewers affection. Though Munro’s story was written in a linear fashion, the unfolding of events is uncovered in a different order in the film. One of such events is the scene in the beginning parts of the film which show Grant visiting Marian’s house as opposed to the story in which the scene doesn’t occur until Fiona had met Aubrey in Meadow Lake. That notwithstanding, each line in the short story did make its way into the script. A central moment in both the film and the story is Grant’s devotion, he cannot bear to stay away from his Fiona as he mentioned ‘‘He wanted never to be away from her. She had the spark of life’’ (Munro,