Soon, a man boards the train and asks if the seat next to her is occupied. They proceed to make small talk, and Rose notices his collar. The man identifies himself as a United Church minister who's off-duty. He discusses an experience he had observing Canadian geese and wild swans in a field during another trip. Rose goes along with the conversation to be polite: ''She remained slightly smiling, so as not to seem rude, not to seem to be rejecting conversation altogether.'' Yet, it's clear that Rose is uncomfortable because she starts inching closer to the window, away from the man sitting next to her.
"Face" provides imagery of the narrator's parents' marriage, which is not utterly happy."Wild Swans" provides imagery of white enslavement. Also, the imagery of "wild swans," which influences the story's title, is vivid.
alice munro wild swans read 12
"There lies the main difference between childish imaginings and imaginative literature. The child 'telling a story' roams about among the imaginary and half-understood without knowing the difference, content with the sound of language and the pure play of fantasy to no particular end, and that's the charm of it. But fantasies, whether folktales or sophisticated literature, are stories in the adult, demanding sense. They can ignore certain laws of physics, but not causality. They start here and go there (or back here), and though the mode of travel may be unusual, and the here and there may be wildly exotic and unfamiliar places, they must both have a location on the map of that world and a relationship to the map of our world. If not, the hearer or reader of the tale will be set adrift in a sea of inconsequential inconsistencies, or, worse yet, left drowning in the shallow puddle of the author's wishful thinking. 2ff7e9595c
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