Joyce carol oates why so violent

Sometimes dialogue predominates; at other times, the prose is richly descriptive. Some of her stories turn on the use of imagery, tone, or rhythm, and plot is all but nonexistent; others are journalistically rich in event and sparse in stylistic embellishment. Some stories approach the length of novels, others are mere brush strokes, several pages or even a single paragraph to express the crux of a character or dramatic situation.

Some stories adhere to the traditional unity and structure of the short story, recounting a single event from beginning to end; others meander, circle in upon themselves, travel backward in time, or derive unity not from the narrative but from character or mood. In brief, Oates uses stories to explore the various tools available to her as a writer. In addition, while each story has integrity as a complete work of fiction, Oates devoted great attention to the composition of her collections, and each is unified structurally or thematically and forms an artistic whole as well as an anthology of smaller parts.

The Wheel of Love consists of stories exploring varieties of love, and those in The Goddess and OtherWomen are all about women. Night-Side and The Seduction contain stories that involve darker, psychologically ambiguous, sometimes surrealistic situations, and the stories in Last Days focus on individuals in upheaval and crisis, on the verge of emotional or physical breakdown.

It is a simple story involving four relatively anonymous characters—a census taker, a boy, a girl, and a mother— and it is told in simple prose against a hazy, fairy-tale-like landscape.

A census taker comes to a remote home to ask questions, but instead of finding the father who can give him the facts that he needs and send him on his way, he is faced with a pair of relentlessly inquisitive children who peel away the layers of his protective delusion in an effort to bring order to their young existence. Eventually, they wear away his confidence in the meaning of any answers, factual or existential, and he leaves without having taken the simplest measure of their household.

At heart is the profound mystery of life which, if not confronted with courage, will drive one to seek refuge in madness, blindness, or obsession.

Henry Award-winner for Perfectly comfortable in front of a class, she is otherwise timid and essentially incapable of developing meaningful human contact. Into her insulated existence comes Allen Weinstein, a brilliant but emotionally disturbed Jewish student. Their relationship, through her perception, becomes a dance of intellectual passion and spiritual magnetism. Allen, however, stops coming to class and, after a prolonged absence, contacts Irene from a sanatorium with a plea that she intervene with his father.

Later, released from the sanatorium, Allen comes to Irene for emotional and financial support, but she painfully and inarticulately denies him, incapable of establishing a meaningful connection.

This tale of confused adolescence, based on a true story of a serial killer in Tucson, Arizona, is about Connie, a fifteen-year-old who abhors her parents, haunts suburban malls, and passes the hot summer nights with her equally precocious girlfriends.

Through it all, however, she privately harbors innocent dreams of ideal love. One day, while home alone, she is approached by a strange man ominously named Arnold Friend, who is determined to seduce her and take her away.

In the end, it is clear that he is leading her to some sort of death, spiritual or physical, and that his love is empty, but she is powerless against him. Oates tells the story naturalistically but includes dreamy and surrealistic passages that suggest allegorical interpretation. These four, and many others, portray moments in time when youth teeters on the brink of adulthood, when innocence is subtly transformed into sophistication, and when desire and love become stronger than life itself.

Floundering in a loving but lifeless marriage, she has been having an affair with a man for whom she feels passion but little trust. An old man approaches her; she eavesdrops on talkative tourists; she peruses the art; she ruminates on her marriage, her affair, and her various uninteresting options.

One photograph especially catches her attention: that of an Indian woman holding out a dead child, her face frozen in an anguished shriek. The story ends as she stands outside their meeting place, no more determined to enter than when she started. The power of the story lies in the photograph as an image. She can see and feel the inherent contradiction of her quandary—frozen in anguish—and through the experience at the museum can only barely begin to take action for self-liberation.

The reader is told that the author did a great deal of research for this novel, and that it is based mainly on the recollections of the real Maureen Wendall. Just before he kills the policeman, Jules is described riding through the burning streets of Detroit with a gun in his hands:.

Jules felt blood running down his face. He thought of blood. He thought of two girls in his childhood, twins, who had been stabbed to death along a city block, one of them struck down in front of her house and the other chased and stabbed so that blood ran in thin streams along the sidewalk, and the next morning everyone had come out to look at the blood. In the frenzied pounding of his blood he felt something heavy emerging, a solid, violent certainty. The theme of blood is established by the obtrusive device of the flashback to childhood, and sustained by insistent repetition.

The reader feels a point being made about the steady violence of American life, and the point plainly comes from the author, not from Jules. Beneath this didactic surface, there is no identification with Jules, no deeply felt experience, no real pity or terror.

Even the letters from Maureen have plainly been edited or rewritten or else she did not deserve that F she claims the author gave her.

The failures of the novel are failures of literary intelligence, of structure and style. Login Access your Commentary account. Email address. Remember me.

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Email the author Login required. Hide Show all. Over Zoom, she talks to me from her living room where the windows are open; I can hear birdsong outside. When we speak, it is five days after the killing of the African American George Floyd , at the hands of a white police officer. The Stars opens with a scene of police brutality, when Whitey is killed after going to the aid of an Indian American man who is being beaten by two officers.

Nothing moves forward. She recalls witnessing the riots in Detroit in You could hear gunfire through the night. So that was the beginning for me. That was when I wrote [the novel] Them and addressed urban unrest and social injustice in my writing. I mean, I had touched on these themes before but nothing so immediate.