" Cortes Island "
by Alice Munro
"Cortes Island"
appeared as the third story in the
collection The Love of a Good Woman (1998).
The book includes the following stories:
Story Summary
In Alice Munro’s short story titled Cortes
Island, a young married couple, move into an elder couple’s basement
apartment in Vancouver. The narrator, who remains nameless through out the
entire story, desperately searches for a job as she is currently unemployed. Her
husband Chess, on the other hand, works for a wholesale grocery firm.
During her stay with the Gorries, Mrs.
Gorrie and the narrator engage in many long conversations over coffee and
cookies. During these discussions, the owner tells her guest stories about being
a newlywed. She also tells her about herself in her younger days when she would
often go “away off in the wilds,” to her beloved Cortes Island.
During another one of their many
conversations, Mrs. Gorrie asks the story teller if she could watch Mr. Gorrie,
seeing as he is confined to his bed due to a serious stroke, a couple of times
out of the week while she volunteers at St. Paul’s hospital.
One evening, while caring for Mr. Gorrie,
she uncovers an old newspaper clipping from a 1923 Vancouver Sun newspaper
regarding a fire that killed a man. As she reads on, she discovers that the
mysterious fire took place on Cortes Island on a boat registered to a Mr. James
Thompson Gorrie. Confused, she demands he give her answers, but gets none.
After coming home from the hospital, Mrs.
Gorrie becomes furious as she finds thrown out scrap paper in the narrator’s
waste basket. As it turned out, she had been writing about all the things she
had found out about that evening in Mr. Gorries room. In the end, the young
couple moves out and away from the Gorries into a bigger and much nicer
apartment. However, the narrator finds herself haunted by the old man and having
strange erotic dreams of her and Mr. Gorrie on the eerie Island.
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