The joke is on us: Images, materiality and visionary realism in Alice Munro’s ‘Eskimo’

Despite – though we may rightly say because of – the nonsense-like qualities of Munro’s ‘Eskimo’, this story offers a powerful challenge to the assumptions that we can so readily, so mistakenly make not only about the practice of writing stories but also in the practice of reading them. The approach taken in this article situates Munro’s story in the critical contexts of a variety of thinkers and critics and in the literary context, specifically, of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland .