This paper is a literary critique of Joyce Carol Oates’ short story collection Marriages and Infidelities, which stresses the author’s concern with violence, interrelationship of world and characters, fragmentation of style, sequence and form.
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.