The Moons of Jupiter (short story)
The moons of Jupiter ( in the original The Moons of Jupiter, 1977/1982 ) is a short story of the Canadian author Alice Munro, in which it is about how facts change.
Action
The story is about Janet, who is visiting her elderly father in the hospital, where she drove him to the emergency room. Janet stayed with one of her daughters, missing the other and makes, among others, a visit to the planetarium where it finds that since their school days have changed some facts. When she makes a quiz on the moons of Jupiter with her father, whose days are numbered, he knows mainly for name to have something to say moon Ganymede. The next afternoon, is a museum of the series and then Janet is back on the way to hospital. So ends the story.
Analysis
The story consists of seven sections, which are not numbered. The shortest section, the last is hardly a page in length, the longest comprises four sides. A narrator jumps in the chronology back and forth. In Alice Munro 's Best Selected stories ( Toronto 2008), the story has a circumference of 17 pages in English.
Words were brought into this story more than just mirror will for things or containers for ideas and skepticism about language and representation in highly stylized form of expression. At the same time the real about the dying was very present. Munro demonstrate in this story is that the power of language can create connections and pathos on the one hand, on other hand it could not do anything against the limited possibilities to describe the world. Ultimately, this was a failure of consciousness result, because it is the world, the Other and the Self could not fully understand, so Tim McIntyre in his analysis of this work.
Professional success must first be achieved, then one should apologize for her character Janet Munro can reflect an expectable judgment of her father. Munro's characters would also be punished if they are successful - for example, as a writer in The moons of Jupiter, as Margaret Atwood in 2013 in The Guardian, in her statement to the Nobel Prize for Alice Munro.
At the first translation into German noted Manuela Reichart 1987 feuilleton of the weekly time that the information collected, the moons of Jupiter in the volume of short stories had a common theme, namely search the aged protagonist of continuity to the biography of her parents and their dealings with their own memories. This meet especially on the eponymous story.
Editions and versions
Was first published, the moons of Jupiter on May 22, 1978 at The New Yorker and 1982 as the title story of the eponymous fourth collection of the author (The Moons of Jupiter). "The Moons of Jupiter" is one of those stories with which Munro succeeded around 1980 international breakthrough. 1996, 2004, 2006 and 2008 has been taken up again in the story collection of the author. The German -language edition of the collection from 1982 was published in 1986 and again in 2002.
In the version that was published in The New Yorker, Janet is not a writer, but a painter. For the second version was in the fifth section "measurement " is inserted ( in italics ): " I saw how the forms of love might also be maintained with a beloved person but with the love in fact Measured and disciplined, Because You have to survive. " Against end of the same section, a block is continued differently. Instead of: " Moonless Mercury rotating three times while circling the sun twice; an old arrangement, not as satisfying as the old one, for once "(1978 ) is called the comparison in the second version: " not as satisfying as whatthey used to tell us - that it Rotated once and it circled the sun " (. 1982)