The story “An Ounce of Cure” is a story portraying the life of a teenage girl. The story unfolds events that will eventually present the decisions a typical teenager will make and the consequences to their actions. The story presents the main character of the story as a typical teenage girl who falls in love, and eventually gets her heart broken and devastated.
As a result, her devastation leads her to making a horrible decision and has to face the consequences of her actions.The short story An Ounce of Cure is about a young woman who lives in a small town in the 60?s where apparently the only thing to do to pass the time is gossip. The story starts off pretty normal with the narrator going to school and earning money by babysitting around town. At this point she has a reputation as the responsible babysitter.
After dating a boy from school for two weeks he breaks up with her and she spirals out of control. She starts with contemplating suicide more and more often and eventually tries a couple of times.After some failed attempts at suicide she decides to help herself to some of her client’s booze while babysitting their children. When the Berrymans arrive home to find their babysitter drunk and alone with their kids, needless to say she was fired and lost most of her clients.
After that she was known all over town as the suicidal alcoholic ex-babysitter. I found it interesting that author Alice Munro made the narrator an adult looking back on how her life was as a teenager. Because the story is narrated in a past tense I did not feel as much of a connection with narrator as I would have if she was a teenager.Munro most likely made the narrator an adult to give her some credibility throughout the story.
If she had been a teenager you might not believe most of what she said during the story because most people think teenagers are liars or exaggerate the tiniest detail. I also thought it was interesting how fast the author escalated the situation from a breakup to contemplating suicide to drinking on the job. Maybe Munro was trying to illustrate to others that no matter how bad things get they could be worse. Chances are your situation will never be bad enough to want to kill yourself or drown yourself in someone lses alcohol while babysitting their children.
I think that if the narrator had been a teenage girl discussing a situation that happened pretty recently, the story would be boring and readers would have less to think about and interpret on.
