The Moons of Jupiter (short story)
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| "The Moons of Jupiter" | |
|---|---|
| Short story by Alice Munro | |
| Country | Canada |
| Language | English |
| Publication | |
| Published in | The New Yorker |
| Publication date | 22 May 1978 |
"The Moons of Jupiter" (1978/1982) is a short story by Canadian author Alice Munro, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2013. It deals with how facts may change over time.[1] The story is 17 pages in length and made up of 7 sections with the shortest section being the final one.
Janet, a divorced, middle-aged writer who has become somewhat successful, is visiting her dying father in a Toronto hospital, where she had driven him the day before. She stays overnight in the apartment of her younger daughter, Judith, who is taking a holiday with her boyfriend, and thinks about (and misses) her older daughter, Nichola, who prefers not to be in touch. Her father, who had initially decided against surgery (which meant a life expectancy of maybe three more months), has changed his mind and is scheduled for surgery the next day. Janet, who had started coming to terms with his prognosis, is unsettled because surgery means the risk of death on the table; in an effort to regain her composure, she goes to a planetarium and stays for a presentation, which prompts many realizations, among them that what was once fact can be supplanted by new information, new facts. That evening at the hospital, she quizzes her father on the moons of Jupiter and the mythical origins of the name of the moon Ganymede, knowing that these might be the last words she will ever hear him utter. The story ends with her reflecting on the moments after the planetarium show earlier that day, in which she came to some acceptance of her older daughter's and father's respective decisions (who both ran away from home, cutting all contact with their parents) and then returned to the hospital.
Interpretation and criticism
In her congratulatory statement on Alice Munro's Nobel Prize in Literature 2013 in The Guardian, Margaret Atwood said with reference to this story that, first, success must first be striven for, and then it seems one has to apologize for it. Munro's characters are being punished even though they are successful, viz the example of the writer Janet in "The Moons of Jupiter", says Atwood.[2] Tim McIntyre, in an analysis of 2009, points out that Munro's realism with its "capacity for characterization, compassion, and presence" is made to function in opposition to the author's "sophisticated understanding of language's inability to represent perfectly either the world or the totality of being."[3]