Summary 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 but also those whose memories are very much intact and stable. This essay evaluates the film Away From Her and the story ‘‘The Bear Came over the Mountain’’, and how it fulfills the expectations of Munro’s story which depicts a husband unable to cope to with the loss of his wife to the point that his devotion led him to provide her with whatever she wanted in the home she inexplicably escaped to. …show more content…
She pinched his earlobes, hard” (Munro, 2013). The two seventy-year-olds prevailed over themselves; Fiona made a towering leap into Aubrey’s arms, and Grant has made his first real sacrifice. Yet, Fiona and Grant have the last word: their vows. As Fiona said, “You could have just driven away,” she said. “Just driven away without a care in the world and forsook me. Forsooken me. Forsaken.”(Munro, 2013) and he said, “Not a chance.” (Munro,