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"What Do You Want to Know For?"
appeared as a story in the
collection The View from Castle Rock (2006) which is Alice Munro's
latest collection of short stories.
The book includes the following stories:
- Part One / No Advantages
- "No Advantages"
- "The View from Castle Rock"
- "Illinois"
- "The Wilds of Morris Township"
- "Working for a Living"
- Part Two / Home
- "Fathers"
- "Lying Under the Apple Tree"
- "Hired Girl"
- "The Ticket"
- "Home"
- "What Do You Want to Know For?"
- Epilogue
Story Summary
This short story is a part of the Canadian author Alice Munro’s
book; The View from Castle Rock. It is basically the story of Alice,
sixty years old, being remarried for the second time. Alice thinks that she may
have breast cancer. She thought this was the case because, one day, she received
a call from her doctor’s clinic. The nurse, wanted to make an appointment so the
doctor could see Alice. Alice remembered being sent to take a mammogram and got
scared. That scare happening at the same time when she and her husband were
trying to trace the origins of an old crypt. They had found the crypt in an old
cemetery, about one year before. During their search, they found a second crypt
in the north-eastern corner of the cemetery. Later, they found out that the one
was originally built for the body of a small child. They were thinking that it
was from maybe the nineteenth century. Also, they found out that other members
of the same family had been buried there. At Alice doctor’s appointment, the
verdict was that there was a lump deep in her left breast. She now had to go see
the city doctor to get a biopsy done. The search goes on and eventually they
started to think about a curious fact. That fact being that a desk with a bible
and a lamp had been left inside the crypt. They were both asking themselves
questions about it and why it had been left there. “Do you think they put any
oil in that lamp?” asked Alice to her husband, who answered that he has been
wondering the same thing. It ends up that Alice’s scare about the breast cancer
was false. A radiologist looked at the mammogram’s results and noted that it had
not changed; Alice was going to be fine.
