Character Analysis of the Narrator in Boys and Girls

Running head:CHARACTER ANALYSIS OF THE NARRATOR IN BOYS AND GIRLS
Character Analysis of the Narrator in Boys and Girls
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CHARACTER ANALYSIS OF THE NARRATOR IN BOYS AND GIRLS
The aim of this paper is to shed light on the character of an eleven-year-old girl and
critically analyse her struggle with societies gender biasness.
The short story named “Boys and Girls” by Alice Munro revolves mainly around the
protagonist of the tale, the unnamed narrator. This story is about the narrator’s struggle being a
girl and how her life got affected by the differentiation between the girls and the boys in her
family as well as the society she is living in. The paper focuses to conduct a literary analysis of
the character of the unnamed narrator in this short tale in terms of identifying the struggle of
being a woman in 20th-century society and to examine how the depiction of the character helps in
reflecting the theme of the condition of women and their struggle regarding gender biasness.
With the help of the character of the narrator, the author shed light on her struggle to get
an equal identity in society. It is ironic enough that the name of the main protagonist of the story
is not provided. The character of the unnamed narrator of the tale is of a small girl who is only
eleven years old. The narrator is a mere young girl living in a time when the condition of women
and girls in the society were sadly deprived, and they had to struggle with an apparent lack of
identity, ‘I thought....a girl’, she is dealing with the society's gender biasness and strive to make
a self-identity ‘A girl.....to become’ (Munro 1983).
The narrator’s character holds a distinctive point of view in terms of her own family and
the society’s biasness and rather intransigent and intractable sight towards life. That is why when
her grandmother deprives her of doing several things, for example, girls should not talk loudly
or they must sit adequately, she use to dislikes such deprivations and do precisely the opposite,
which shows the rebellious side of her character. She prefers to help her father in his slaughter
work rather than helping her mother in the kitchen, as she finds household works to be boring,
‘to get......I hated it’. Also, she dislikes her mother's statement that her brother is going to be her