The text, the image and the implicit in Alice Munro's 'Images' and 'Postcard'
Résumé
The titles of "Images" and "Postcard" suggest that the visual is an important element of the stories and indeed these stories are pictorially saturated, to use Liliane Louvel's expression. A short story is composed of words not pictures, but words can produce pictorial effects. These images appear in Munro's two stories as devices of intensity; they contain and condense either elements of the story or the story itself, contributing to the "unity of effect" which is characteristic of the short story genre. Because the images show rather than tell, but also because they both reveal and conceal, they function in relation to the implicit.