In the ACLE, the broken chronology of events presented in “The Progress of Love” is defined to be “kaleidoscopic”. Through this kaleidoscopic lens, Munro successfully reveals that our memories are sometimes tainted with human perception and therefore we must question their reliability. For instance, Marietta recalls her mother’s attempted suicide to be serious and with great intent. She witnessed her mother’s neck tied with a rope hung on a beam. She carried this traumatizing memory with her throughout her life and passed the story on to her daughter, Euphemia. However, her sister Beryl recollects the incident differently. She notes that the rope was not even tied to the beam so her mother would not have been able to hang herself. She adds that her mother’s attempted suicide was meant to only “get a rise out of [the father]” (p. 696). This shows that there is more than one version of the “truth”. What is interesting is that both Marietta and Beryl insist that their version is truer than the other.

Furthermore, Euphemia’s rendition of her memory of her mother burning her inheritance is tested by her father’s recollection of the event. Euphemia had seen her father standing by to watch, to “protect” her mother as she burned the $3000 inheritance she received from her father (Euphemia’s grandfather). She saw this as an act of love as he let her burn the money that could have been used to provide for the family. However, it is revealed later on that her father had no knowledge of this act and actually disproved of it. Despite this revelation, Euphemia chooses to stick to her version of the story, but stopped “expecting people to see it the way [she] did” (p. 701). Her choice to stick to her memory is significant, because she is holding on to the memory as a way to prove that her parents had loved each other deeply.

By telling the story from two different perspectives and several timelines, Munro effectively delivers the fact that there are many different versions of truth, and they are based solely on how a person perceives them.