65 pages • 2-hour read
Runaway: Stories
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Character Analysis
Content Warning: This section of the guide contains discussion of death and death by suicide.
Juliet
Because she features in three separate stories (“Chance,” “Soon,” and “Silence”), Juliet is unique among the characters in Runaway. This continuity transforms her from a figure glimpsed in moments of crisis into a character studied in depth, providing a chance to see how Munro investigates the effect of choices and the slow unfolding of destiny. “Chance” introduces Juliet as a young woman still deeply immersed in studying classic literature. On the train, she reflects on not only Greek texts but also the imaginative framework of Greek tragedy. Her academic passion isn’t incidental. The sense of fate that permeates her worldview colors her encounters, particularly her possible involvement in the death by suicide of a man who had spoken to her. Juliet worries that she was “cruel” for not engaging with him. She can’t help feeling complicit. This sense of responsibility resembles the guilt of tragic protagonists who feel bound by forces beyond their control. When she meets Eric on the train shortly afterward, Juliet likewise interprets the encounter through a lens of destiny. She doesn’t simply view it as a coincidence, but as an event charged with significance, something that had to happen. This conception of fate complicates her understanding of agency. By likening her life to the role of a character in a Greek tragedy, she positions herself as both responsible and powerless: responsible for the consequences of chance interactions but powerless to alter destiny. Juliet’s intellectual attachment to the classics becomes a metaphor for how she narrates her own life, seeing in it a mixture of free will and inevitability.
In “Soon,” the pragmatism of adulthood replaces the romance of Juliet’s youth. She’s now married to Eric and has a young daughter, Penelope. The marriage, though not unhappy in a violent or overtly dramatic sense, is strained. Eric’s presence in this story is largely indirect, but Juliet’s reflections suggest a life of compromise rather than fulfillment. The story focuses on Juliet’s attempt to reconcile her adult self with her role as a daughter. Juliet’s mother is depicted with fragility and a yearning for connection. Juliet has moved from the idealism of youthful encounters to the guarded negotiations of middle age. A crucial irony emerges: Juliet, who once read her life as if it were a Greek play, finds herself repeating patterns she can’t recognize until it’s too late. Her relationship with her mother is fraught with misunderstanding and distance, foreshadowing what happens with her own daughter in “Silence.” By this point, Juliet’s marriage to Eric is in the past, and the focus turns to her daughter, Penelope, who has withdrawn completely from contact. Juliet learns that Penelope has chosen to cut her mother out of her life. The silence is devastating because it confirms the pattern Juliet once experienced with her mother. Whereas she had felt alienated from her own parents, she now becomes the figure from whom love and connection are withheld.
The decision to feature Juliet in three stories highlights a contrast with other characters in Runaway. Figures in the other stories are depicted in transformative moments, but aren’t revisited. Their lives are glimpsed as if through windows, leaving the consequences largely to readers’ imaginations. Juliet, by contrast, is shown in the aftermath. This sustained attention forces readers to confront the temporal dimension of character: People don’t remain in a single moment of crisis, but continue, often carrying the same burdens into new stages of life. Juliet’s appearance as a continuous thread in several stories dramatizes the persistence of loss and the haunting of the present by the past.
Grace
Grace is a character caught between two worlds: the world of her poor upbringing and the world of relative comfort that she encounters in the Travers family. The contrast between Grace’s background and the Travers family is stark. Munro describes Grace as someone raised by her “bewildered” relatives after she was abandoned by her parents. She grew up with little expectation of ease or security. It’s precisely this absence that makes the Travers household so astonishing. The abundance of food, the orderly rhythms of domesticity, and the unselfconscious security of the family represent a world she never imagined possible. Her attraction to Maury is inseparable from this setting. While she agrees to marry him, her decision is driven less by desire for Maury than by what he embodies: the possibility of belonging in a family whose material stability could shelter her from the precariousness of her own past. She loves Mrs. Travers, for example, “as Maury had fallen in love with her” (165). Munro makes it clear that Grace doesn’t really love Maury. The absence of romantic feeling highlights how Grace measures her choices in terms of survival and comfort rather than idealized love. Accepting Maury’s proposal appears to her as a way of accepting a destiny that includes security, even if it excludes excitement. At the same time, the decision reflects her uncertainty about whether she deserves something more. Grace’s lack of genuine affection for Maury isn’t simply an emotional detail; it reflects the deeper conflict between her awareness of her own worth and her suspicion that happiness isn’t meant for her.
Her prosaic engagement to Maury, then, becomes a kind of narrative of resignation. The slow and dutiful engagement sets the stage for the abrupt intrusion of Maury’s stepbrother, Neil. Grace’s encounter with Neil overturns her expectations. Unlike Maury, Neil doesn’t represent comfort; he represents knowledge of suffering. The son of Mrs. Travers’s first marriage, he carries an air of disturbance, which his alcohol addiction sharpens. Grace immediately recognizes “the smell of liquor edged with mint” (180). She understands what others in the family don’t see (or are unwilling to see). Her recognition stems from her own history of loss and hardship. She feels a bond with Neil, not because of shared joy but because of shared suffering. Their brief adventure together (a few hours of driving lessons, illicit drinking, and intimate conversation) generates a sense of vitality in Grace that she never felt with Maury. Her kiss with Neil isn’t merely romantic but symbolic: In touching Neil, she touches a dimension of her buried past. This recognition unsettles her carefully laid plan to step into the Travers family’s world of comfort. With Neil, she glimpses authenticity, even if that authenticity is inseparable from pain.
The story’s climax comes with Neil’s death, which frees Grace from the expectation of marrying Maury. Grace doesn’t collapse under grief. Instead, she accepts the Travers family’s parting gift of money, intended to silence her about Neil’s drinking and his end. She uses the money to begin her life independently. This conclusion complicates the idea of a “happy ending.” On one hand, Grace is released from an engagement she didn’t want and receives the means to construct a life on her own terms. On the other hand, this freedom is born out of tragedy and silence. She accepts payment for her silence about Neil, a transaction that symbolizes the erasure of his suffering to preserve the family’s respectability, as well as Grace’s commitment to pragmatism and practicality. The story deliberately leaves it ambiguous whether this counts as happiness. Grace’s liberation is complicated. Her independence is tinged with compromise, just as her earlier engagement was tinged with resignation. The fact that she builds her life from money given in exchange for silence suggests that she can’t fully separate her progress from the tragedies that have shaped her.
Robin
In “Tricks,” Robin yearns for an alternative life, which the story expresses through her solitary excursions to Stratford. Robin lives with her sister, Joanne, whose illness requires care and whose bitterness colors their relationship. Joanne contemptuously regards Robin’s trips to Stratford as a mark of pretension. However, Robin’s theater visits aren’t motivated by social display; they’re an expression of individuality, a space where she can briefly imagine herself apart from her stifling domestic life. For Robin, to go alone is to assert her independence and to imagine that her life might contain possibilities beyond her immediate responsibilities. Within this framework of annual escape, she meets Daniel by chance when she loses her purse and feels suddenly helpless. Daniel’s intervention rescues her from humiliation, offering her both practical aid and the suggestion of another kind of existence. His appearance symbolizes the romance and possibility that she allowed herself to imagine only from a distance. What she falls in love with isn’t necessarily Daniel himself but the potential he represents, which is why she dedicates a year to imagining their lives together. Robin invests their brief encounter with transformative meaning, seeing in Daniel the possibility of an alternative narrative for her life.
For 12 months, the thought of reuniting with Daniel sustains Robin. Her feelings for him become entwined with her longing for escape. She projects onto Daniel the role of liberator, someone who could lift her from the monotony of her life with Joanne and into the romance she has so far been denied. The cruelty of the story lies in the twist. When she returns to Stratford the following year, she’s met with apparent rejection. She believes that Daniel has spurned her, and the hope she nurtured collapses. In a bitter irony, Robin’s life is altered not by a grand betrayal but by a trick of mistaken identity, an almost theatrical device that mirrors the Shakespeare plays she loves. Like the characters in Shakespeare’s plays, she’s subject to coincidence, disguise, and misunderstanding. However, while such devices in drama often end in reconciliation, in Robin’s case, they end in lifelong regret. Her fate is to imagine what might have been, never knowing what life with Daniel would truly have meant. The fact that she never falls in love again suggests that the potential she once glimpsed has become an enduring absence.
Nancy
In “Powers,” Nancy’s early behavior illustrates her immaturity and self-centeredness. She prides herself on playing jokes, but her pranks are often cruel and don’t amuse anyone but her. When she plays a trick on Wilf, he responds with “not a flicker of a smile” (275). This example shows that Nancy’s jokes are less about wit than about performance. She craves the attention they bring, even when that attention is hostile. She accepts Wilf’s ensuing proposal not from affection but from the thrill of being desired. For Nancy, the wedding becomes a stage on which she can shine, more important as a spectacle than as a lifelong commitment. Her diary reflects this preoccupation, showing how she focuses on the event’s display rather than on Wilf himself. This same need for validation motivates her interactions with Ollie. He’s worldly and sophisticated, so Nancy is eager to impress him. Her introduction of Tessa to Ollie is less an act of kindness toward Tessa than a way of borrowing power through association. She draws attention to Tessa’s strange abilities in the hope that Ollie will admire her for recognizing them. In doing so, she reduces Tessa to a means of self-promotion. Nancy doesn’t foresee the tragic consequences, yet her actions set in motion Ollie’s exploitation of Tessa and her eventual institutionalization.
Because of Nancy’s vanity and desire for recognition, she fails to see Tessa as a full person. Tessa’s gift, which could have been handled with care, becomes a tool for Nancy to capture Ollie’s interest. The consequence is that Tessa loses control over her life, and Nancy must eventually confront the damage she has wrought. Her remorse contrasts with her earlier frivolity, as the story traces the shift from youthful selfishness to aging regret. As Nancy matures, she’s haunted by what happened to Tessa. She eventually understands that her actions weren’t merely playful or inconsequential but deeply harmful. The story’s structure emphasizes this belated recognition by presenting Nancy in later life, revisiting her past, and seeking a form of atonement. However, atonement may be impossible. Nancy must live with the knowledge that her vanity contributed to Tessa’s suffering. The final dream sequence underscores the weight of this guilt. Nancy’s dream at the story’s end signals a reversal of her earlier self-absorption: Whereas once she thought mostly of herself, she now thinks relentlessly of another. However, this shift comes too late to help Tessa, leaving Nancy with the torment of empathy but not the relief of restitution. Rather than catharsis or atonement, Nancy’s subconscious is dominated by thoughts of others. She’s no longer self-centered; in her own mind, she cedes the stage to Tessa’s pain.
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