Analyse af Alice Munros novelle 'A Red Dress'

The Nobel-prize winner Alice Munro wrote the short story” A Red Dress” in 1985. The short story is about a girl which goes from being a confused girl, to become an adult woman. A girl who goes to high school, experience her first kiss. We follow an unnamed first person narrator; the story is told through her points of view. We hear her thoughts and her opinions throughout the story.

The girl is not a very confident girl, and she doesn’t have much confident. She's not particularly likening her high school, she gets nervous just having to answer a little question I class, or if she shall write something on the blackboard. “At high school I was never comfortable for a minute.”

The looking good is very important to the narrator and her wish to be liked or accepted by others is further noticeable when she is in her bedroom with Lonnie. The reader discovers that she has filled out some questionnaires from a magazine to see if she (and Lonnie) would be considered popular. “We did questionnaires in magazines, to find out whether we had personality and whether we would be popular.” She feels a pressure to fit into normal, she would like to be a bit like Lonnie, who can buy her own dress, it is the feeling to be normal. The girl is trying to choose the easy way out by trying to get sick, up to her prom. She has her window open at a cold December night, she takes snow on her chest to get fever. She exhibits a form of nervousness and fear of the unknown and different. “Above the couch, on the wallpaper, were old games of Xs and Os, old drawings and scribbling’s my brother and I had done when we were sick with bronchitis. I looked at them and longed to be back safe behind the boundaries of childhood.” She sees things in a negative way, she wants to do and be like the others are. She admires the other students, and would like to be like them, they are free and in her world they have nothing to worry about, they smoke at school, and no one can stop them. She would like to be like everyone else is. She admires others more than her self. Although she is a girl who can be very self-critical and have a negative way of seeing herself and her surroundings in, she shows that by not to go with Mary Fortune out and drink coffee, she takes an independent decision, and choose what is best for her, and if she does not have done it, she had never kiss with Raymond. In addition to the samples she even be like the other students, as I previously wrote about. She detaching themselves and choose what is best for herself this time, and that is an adults decision. It's a girl becoming a woman.