The View from Castle Rock Reading Guide & Discussion Questions

Book Club Discussion Questions

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For supplemental discussion material see our Beyond the Book article, and our BookBrowse Review of The View from Castle Rock.

Please be aware that this discussion guide will contain spoilers!

About This Book

In her most personal collection to date, Alice Munro has created stories based on her own past as well as by elaborating on the traces—letters, records, tombstones—left behind by her ancestors from Scotland who sailed for Canada in 1818.  In the title story, ten-year-old Andrew Laidlaw is taken by his father James to see the view of America—though later he learns that it’s really Fife—from Edinburgh’s Castle Rock. When the family takes ship for the new world, the father who had longed to leave Scotland becomes solidly a man of his homeland, nostalgic for the world he’s left behind. His daughter-in-law gives birth at sea, and his son becomes intimate with a young woman dying of tuberculosis. The immigrants struggle to create a new world for themselves, as their lives become a part of the history of the land they’ve settled. A father dies, a newborn baby disappears—apparently kidnapped—and is found again.

In the second part of the book, Munro moves closer to her immediate family and her own girlhood in a world where families struggle to get by on small farms along Lake Huron. A hired girl, working for a wealthy family at a summer resort, is faced with the realization of her lack of status in the social world. In an apple orchard, a clever girl and a canny young man discover a private place for romance. A young woman about to be married hears about the love affairs of her grandmother and great aunt, and is offered a surprising gift. The landscape, throughout, is marked with human toil and traces of habitation, and all its vanishing details—a cellar hole, a grave—hold the stories of those who lived there long ago. In The View from Castle Rock, Munro brings the passions, the labor and the yearnings of the dead to life again, allowing readers to recognize, in them, ourselves.



For Discussion

1. "No Advantages": Visiting the graveyard of Ettrick Church, Munro finds the tombstone of her great-great-great-great grandfather, and is struck with a feeling that "Past and present lumped together here made a reality that was commonplace and yet disturbing beyond anything I had imagined" [p. 7]. What is disturbing about this merging of past and present?
2. "The View from Castle Rock": Agnes is a willful, sexually alert woman, trapped in her fate as a woman and mother [p. 72]. She is married to Andrew Laidlaw although she had been involved with his brother James [p. 67], who has already gone out to Nova Scotia. Andrew, we are told, "was the one that she needed in her circumstances" [p. 55]. What might her circumstances have been? In what ways does Agnes seem to embody the desires and frustrations of women in her time, and possibly in our time?  
3. Why does the old James mention "the curse of Eve" with regard to Agnes [pp. 44-45]? Discuss Munro’s prose in the paragraphs describing Agnes’ childbirth [pp. 46-47]. What is most effective, moving, or realistic about this scene?

Unless otherwise stated, this discussion guide is reprinted with the permission of Vintage. Any page references refer to a USA edition of the book, usually the trade paperback version, and may vary in other editions.