Marriages and Infidelities (Joyce Carol Oates)

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 b

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ain punctured further by the reality she provokes, then they are most likely shying away from the introjection of reader into character which renders the reader vulnerable and almost responsible. Upon reading Oates' stories, I am needled with the obligation to act, to do something, having been impelled, despite myself, by the momentum of her convictions, whose force is at the same time negated somewhat by her counter-conviction that, although life is cruel and harsh, that is the way things are. Change may be as inevitable as our doom, but resistance is not her mode - submission and a detached acceptance is her motivation. She introduces the facts while not allowing herself to get tangled up in the well of conflict introduced by her grisly bits of reality. "These (stories in Marriages and Infidelities) are her characteristic exercises in extreme sympathy, a sympathy that lays out all the facts and almost scientifically withholds easy judgments. . . ." In "Puzzle," Oates explores the intertwined relationship of three people grappling with the strain of survival, thwarted by the emotional agony they afflict on one another, yet clearly unable to take the elements of her life and unravel the mystery of each so as to pass judgmen
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Approximate Word count = 2359
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)