45 pages • 1 hour read
Alice MunroBoys And Girls
Fiction | Short Story | Adult | Published in 1964A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Essay Topics
Although the narrator seems to gain some kind of understanding of a new role by the end of the story, how would you describe the change that occurs in her? Does she seem confident in a new position? Has she lost, or gained, identity by the end of the story?
How do animals relate to humans across the story?
What are the natural life cycles that Munro uses to tell the story of “Boys and Girls”? Do they seem “natural” to the narrator? Why or why not?
The narrator learns from her parents in many ways. But what does she learn from herself, from those outside her family, or from the natural world around her? How do those lessons converge and diverge from the examples her parents provide?
Munro does not make much use of dialogue across this story. Why does she tell the story mostly from the narrator’s perspective? How does the dialogue communicate what the narrator cannot?
Describe the narrator’s relationship with her brother. Does their relationship evolve or change across the text? Which specific moments, in your eyes, define their relationship?
The physical space of the farm seems charged with importance for the narrator. Pick one space—the house, the barn, the fox pen, or another—and describe the narrator’s relationship to that space. How does her vision of physical space tell the reader nabout the way she thinks about the world?
Related Titles
By Alice Munro
