An Ounce of Cure: a Story of a Typical Girl Who Fell in Love and Hurt

The story “An Ounce of Cure” written by Alice Munro is a story about a typical teenage girl who fell in love, enjoyed it, and later broken up. She ended up making a terrible mistake due to her miserable condition suffered from the “broke up”; and she had to pay for the price of her action.

The story began with a teenage girl, living in a typical family and attends high school. One day, she caught this boy, named Martin Collingwood, in the school assembly flirting with her. She was definitely attracted to him. And after a couple weeks, they started going out. All those romantic moments that happened in most in-love teenage couples occurred between her and Martin. The kiss on the mouth and the feeling of love made her mindful of Martin. But the mutable mind of a teenager quickly soured the love between Martin and her; Martin fell for another girl which was in the same drama club as him, and consequently dropped her. From that moment on, she entered the phase of her heart broken devastation caused by Martin. She pretended that she was fine, and make everything seemed just alright whenever she caught in the situation involves Martin in it. She acted like she doesn’t care about him, but everything in her mind was full of him. She would accidentally talk about him in the conversation between her and her friends. Her devastation was slowly depressing her as each day progresses. During one of those typical days that she had her job as a baby-sitter in Mr. Berryman’s, she did a horrible mistake that any heartbroken teenager would do.

She wandered into the kitchen of the Berryman’s house, and she found two bottles of whisky sitting in front of her. The emotional part of her eventually pushed her forward to gush down two full cups of whisky down her throat. Little that she know of; she was drunk a moment later. She was conquered by the liquor’s effect and was throwing up inside the restroom of the Berryman’s house. She was later saved by her friend Joyce and a group of other friends of Joyce. Her mistake was not concealable; it was quickly discovered by Mr. Berryman after he came home. She was being sent home, and the smell of liquor betrayed her as long as she walks into the door. Her mum knew something was up, and she ended up telling the entire story to her mum from top to bottom without missing a detail. Her mum, a smart woman, who knows what she was doing, quickly went ahead and gave her apology to the Berryman with a bottle of Whisky the next day. The news about that night spread swiftly around the small town. Everyone was talking about it for a while. And to her, she learnt a valuable lesson of moving on, and she did move on after that incident. From then on, she was never bothered by her devastation from love again. And Martin became one of those usual town people who she could sometimes heard a story or two about (Delbanco).

The style and tone set in this story did not feel as emotional and sad as how the girl’s devastated love story was like. It was obvious that the girl had got over the pain of the incident, and looking at it in a way of flashback. In fact, a sense of sarcasm could be felt while the narrator illustrates the story (karina); like how she used “Mermaid drinking the witch’s crystal potion” (Delbanco 155) to describe the feeling of her urge to drink the whisky and “a fat blond girl in Grade Ten ran away with a married man” (Delbanco 158) to tell how her news ended in the town. This leads to the theme of the story, which could be teenager growing up.

Everyone went through the teenager stage. As a teenager, most of them don’t handled situation well, especially when it comes to love and relationship. They tended to manipulate small matters into a big problem, just like the narrator putting herself in the hardship of the aftermath of her broken relationship. Another theme could be the typical love story of teenager. The narrator’s story about her and Martin can be interpreted into many teenagers’ relationships nowadays. They flirt, they fall in love, they go out a couple times, and start a relationship, which quickly soured and depicts into a sad ending. Then it takes one or both side doing some dumb actions that they never forget to get through a relationship. This kind of situation could always be found inside a teenager’s life or in an adult’s memory.

The setting of the story was depicted in a small town, since the narrator mentioned that news could be spread quickly inside her town. The narrator’s story took place while she was a teenager, living in a neighborhood, and she has a job as a baby-sitter at her neighbor’s house. Also, she was attending high school, and that’s where all her drama starts. The narrator told the story in a first person point of view. The narrator described the story using her own tone, and reader was able to catch the emotions and thoughts of the narrator. One of the major symbols that the narrator used in the story was the two cups of whisky. They are the cause of the terrible mistakes that the narrator made, and they seem to represent all the sad emotions and the depressing self of the narrator. They also seem to represents the end of the dramatic devastation of the narrator. After the consumption of the two cups of whisky, things got to the worst point of the whole story. From there onwards, the narrator started realizing herself, and figured out the right path to deal with her problems.

Works Cited

Delbanco, Nicholas, and Alan Cheuse. “An Ounce of Cure.” Literature: Craft and Voice. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012. 153-58. Print. “karina825.” Web log post. Karina825. WordPress.com, 30 Aug. 2011. Web. 02 Feb. 2013.

I have chosen this topic as my essay because, this is a story that was easy to be understood, and it was one of those ordinary story on how teenager deal with the aftermath of a relationship that people could find a connection point between the story and themselves. I like reading stories that are fictional and tend to stick with common experience that people had in daily life, thus I choose “An ounce of cure” as my choice.