This research paper is a literary critique of Joyce Carol Oates' Marriages and Infidelities, a collection of short stories.
Joyce Carol Oates' writing is like a puzzle, whose pieces are either already put into place for you, or whose edges are so obscure that they do not mesh to form a comprehensible design of events. Each piece is exact and fitting in some places leaving some room for intrigue and mystery, or so distorted in other places that the meaning becomes disfigured. But it goes without saying that in all of Joyce Carol Oates' short stories, there is an intensity of feeling which comes charging through the simplicity and starkness of her writing that transcends most of her vague transitions and shadowy relations between characters. Images are not even left to the reader's imagination and description is kept to a minimum.
Ms. Oates is concerned with the way in which the world acts upon her characters, and how they, in turn, act upon one another. It is the accumulation of experiences filling the void of our beings, like trash in a receptacle, that is only emptied, relieved of its contents, after it is overflowing, that is the ongoing theme of most of her short stories. She seems to bring her characters to the breaking point, to the apogee of their tolerance and will for life, and in the end they give in, some give up, perhaps against their will, from some outside imposition. Her characters are run over by trucks, killed by their husbands (as with the frail blonde female charity patient in "Inventions" who is killed by her husband, having become resigned to the fact before it actually happens, sensing her impending doom and struggling against it until fate intercedes and takes over); and the little boy Jackie (in "Puzzle") who is at the mercy of his overanxious parents, ridden with guilt at the responsibility of this child's welfare, whose "accidental drowning" is closer to a self-fulfilled prophecy.
There is a...