We must conclude now with a short return to Kent in the 1990s, where Kath has become a stranger not simply to us, but to Kent as well. He does not think it worth his time to visit her in Ontario, but cannot decide whether this is because he fears “[t]o see her a stranger that he couldn’t believe he’d ever been married to, or to see that she could never be a stranger yet was unaccountably removed” (97). Instead, Kent seems to have learned something of “life after the change” in the decades since his divorce from Kath. When Sonje remarks that “young people seem unimportant to me. As if they could vanish off the earth and it wouldn’t really matter,” Kent immediately responds, “[j]ust the opposite…That’s us you’re talking about. That’s us” (98). …show more content…
Of course, “[t]hat was only natural and not a surprise to him,” so that “these lives, the lives his sons and daughter were living, seemed closed in now, somewhat predictable” to him. Kent has therefore accepted Gorra’s change, and adjusted his life accordingly. Indeed, shifting back in its closing paragraph to the present tense in which it began, “Jakarta” implies that unceasing but mercifully slow change will continue to be Kent’s fate in the coming years. Here, the narrator explains how Kent’s “thoughts stretch out long and gauzy and lit up like vapor trails. He travels a thought that has to do with staying here, with listening to Sonje talk about Jakarta while the wind blows sand off the dunes. A thought that has to do with not having to go on, to go home” (98). Comfortable for the time being, and reasonably happy with Deborah, why should Kent not also be content to allow life to continue around him as it inevitably will once he is …show more content…
The illiberal, even radical nature of Cottar and Sonje’s social circle, for example, means that they are not anticipating the social changes soon to follow with the 1960s, and so we cannot say that Cottar’s communism has any wider political relevance to the time in which Munro sets the story. This is to say nothing of Kath, who cannot reconcile and thus does not take sides between Cottar and Kent’s competing convictions. Rather than scorn these mysteries, however, we must conclude, as Byatt does, that they are inherent to Munro’s fiction. In Love, she declares, Munro “is partly examining the formation of highlighted and significant memories, and partly showing how these memories are selective, partial, and obscuring” (xvi). While it might ostensibly concern the dissolution of Kath and Kent’s marriage, therefore, the narrative is truly preoccupied with the Mayberrys’s unmistakably “selective, partial, and obscuring” experience of the story’s events. Though this preoccupation manifests itself throughout “Jakarta” by means of Munro’s shifting internal focalization, it ultimately declares the text’s central