nother common theme in Ms. Oates' short stories - she creates a sense of detachment (partly expressed by her repeated line, "I am not here," used in many of her stories), and at the same time she counters this detachment with an intensity of feeling that seems to yearn for the detachment as the only refuge; and for many of her characters, this final relief can only come through death.
Her lack of detailed analysis, visual imagery, descriptive prose, or shifting focuses within one piece, lend her stories a carefully guarded style that is too stark, and the segue of thoughts and events too abrupt to allow for smooth, engrossed reading. Rather than merging with her characters, it is preferable for the reader to regard them from an objective distance, lest we become equally emotionally entangled in her web of contradictions, and her whirlpool of obsession. While keeping her writing stark, she appears to be preventing poetry in her prose rather than striving for simplicity of style.
The point of view remains constant - the reader is always looking through her eyes at her subjective world. Her problem, says Brad Darrack, is "temperament." Her main subject is her self and therefore, her character's must all veer in the same direction.
There is a total absence from or disregard for form in most of her short stories. Her experiments with form in "
Nightmusic," and "Plots," are not successful and suffer from an almost contrived passion; it is too subjective to convey meaning. The impact of sheer anguish and terror which permeates her themes create their own amorphous mass that smothers its characters rather than shaping them. What Elizabeth Dalton has disapprovingly called "violence in the head," is, I suppose, the vestiges of her Irish-Catholic, working-class background. "She is too burdened by some mysterious demon to want to be an artist, to make the right and well-fitting structure. . . ."
What makes a true artist,...