According to The Norton Introduction to Literature, "An initiation story is in which a character-often but not always a child or young person- first learns, or is initiated into a significant truth about the universe, reality, society, people, himself or herself" (379). Alice Munro's short story, "Boys and Girls" is an initiation story, where the narrator goes through an intense and radical initiation into adulthood. The narrator is initiated into an understanding that growing up means accepting our limitations, and being a female will shape her role in life, which we seldom recognize in our youth. The narrator is an adult woman, who is looking back on the series of events that moves her from the childhood tomboy into the mature woman.
             Munro creates an unnamed narrator, so the readers can perceive her as a universal female adolescent figure, and being unnamed means without identity or prospect of power. However, her younger brother is named Laird, a synonym for lord; hence, he is invested with identity and is to become a master. The name symbolizes that the male child is superior in the parent's eyes. The narrator's father is a fox farmer. He is a hard worker and a quiet man, whom the narrator believes can be depended upon. Conversely, the narrator distrusts her mother and feels that she [the mother] is unreliable, easily fooled, and ignorant about the way things really are. She describes her feelings, "My mother, I felt, was not to be trusted. She was kinder than my father and more easily fooled, but you could not depend on her" (389).
             The narrator has problems coming to terms with the role in life that society's expectations have on her. She enjoys helping her father outside with the foxes while she hates the hot dark kitchen, and thinks that the housework is "endless, dreary and peculiarly depressing." She thinks that her mother is plotting to keep her in...