Reading Response #4: "Baptizing" and "Epilogue: The Photographer"

I had thought that the final chapter, “Baptizing” would be about Del baptizing her child, but it is about her first love affair. When Garnet tries to baptize Del in order to marry her, it dawns on Del that she had never meant to have a serious relationship with Garnet. They are from different worlds and she feels that she was too good for him and his family. While Garnet is in earnest, she is delirious over sex. In the end, Garnet lets her go:

He would not come. If we had been older we would certainly have hung on, haggled over the price of reconciliation, explained and justified and perhaps forgiven, and carried this into the future with us, but as it were we were close enough to childhood to believe in the absolute seriousness and finality of some fights, unforgivability of some blows. We had seen in each other what we could not bear, and we had no idea that people do see that, and go on, and hate and fight and try to kill each other, various ways, then love some more (199).

Although both are too naïve, their solemn parting is sad. It closes another chapter of her life.

We leave Del at a point of uncertainty in her life, at a crossroads. We don’t know whether she will go to university and lead the life her mother always wanted, or if she will follow in her mother’s footsteps. Del has not yet fully matured, but is only at another transitional stage in her life as the camera pans out.

In the epilogue, the reader learns that she does indeed leave Jubilee, and longs for it afterwards:

People’s lives, in Jubilee as elsewhere, were dull, simple, amazing and unfathomable – deep caves paved with kitchen linoleum. It did not occur to me then that one day I would be so greedy for Jubilee. … No list could hold what I wanted, for what I wanted was every last thing, every layer of speech and thought, stroke of light on bark or walls, every smell, pothole, pain, crack, delusion, held still and held together- radiant, everlasting (210).

Del is no longer too ambitious and proud for Jubilee. She had run through childhood and adolescence barely looking both ways, but there will come a time when she wants to stop and rewind and catch all the details in slow motion. Perhaps it’s a time when she’s lost herself and she wants to find something solid to ground her. Perhaps at that time, so much time will have passed her that she wants to hold on to a time when time did not matter. The reader ends up wanting “every last thing” to last as well, because Del’s world has become so real. In the end, Del learns to appreciate people as they are, in their every day humdrum. It's a fitting ending because every day life is what Munro celebrates.