Alice Munro's narrative technique

Reading the short story - always an intellectual challenge, more so than the seemingly more daunting novel - in that a story requires the writer, and the reader, to get it all on the table right away - we're immediately introduced to the cast of characters, and there's little time for back story, interior monologue, context - everything has to be in motion within a few pages, or in fact within a few paragraphs. And this difficulty is exacerbated for those of us brave or foolish enough to read right through an author's collection of stories - a new set of characters, a new adjustment of perspective and point of view, with every entry. And let's add a 3rd degree of difficulty - how about reading an Alice Munro collection (as I'm now doing, reading straight through her 1996 Selected Stories)? Because Munro willfully (and brilliantly) breaks the conventions of the short story. Because of the constriction of the form, it's usually important that the writer make clear very quickly who the main characters are, the setting, the time, the essential conflict of the plot. Munro blithely flouts this convention. The story White Dump in her collection is a great example: we struggle with the characters quickly introduced at the outset, trying to figure out who they are - there are several generations, and not clear who's married to whom or who's not married at all, but we do know that we're in a made over summer summer house on an Ontario lakeshore - and as is so typical of Munro at first we think we're following one character as the "main character" but that character may shift into the background and another character emerges from the background - like a figure coming to the surface on a developing print - and "takes over" the story. This shifting of perspective - as she herself described it like roaming around from room to room in a big house - earns our deep and focused attention, as we try to follow the plot - and it would never work if the plot were not compelling and intelligent and emotionally fraught, as her stories always are. An adjacent piece in this collection, Miles, Montana, is not nearly so challenging - the characters are more distinct in age and generation and easier to "track" - but it does exhibit some of Munro's sly technique: begins by describing a young girl's witnessing the recovery of drowned boy's body and then jumps forward to a time when the girl is a mom w/ two children, embarking on a x-country drive - it takes some time before we understand the significance of the first section of the story, the drowned boy, but she does pull the story together in a neat, maybe too neat, fashion - but  those who expect straightforward story line will be bewildered by her techniques - a conventional way to tell the story would be to make it all be about the x-country trip and to have the drowning incident appear as a memory or flashback. Her sequencing is bold and surprising and makes her stories far more vivid and impressive.