Neither the joy, however, nor the tragedy is ever complete, for human experience as Oates sees it is always a complex and mixed phenomenon.
Isolation, detachment, and even alienation create the obstacles that her characters struggle to overcome, and while Oates has been criticized for the darkness of her writing, as often as not her characters find redemption, hope, and even happiness. Oates often establishes their subjectivity with remarkable clarity, allowing the reader to bring wider knowledge and perspective to the story to fill it out and complete the emotional impact. Many of her characters have a builtin isolation: That is not to say that they are not involved with other people, but that their perceptions are necessarily limited, and that they are aware, though not always specifically, of those limits. Her fascination with images of the American Dream and the power of belief and self-creation implied therein translates to an awareness of her characters’ selfperceptions, and, equally, their self-deceptions. Relationships of individuals to the world around them are keys to many of Oates’s stories. Like the United States, however, such characters retain an unbounded youthful enthusiasm, an arrogant challenge to the future and the outside world. In her short stories, the naïveté is often the innocence of youth many stories focus on adolescent girls becoming aware of the potential of their own sexuality and the dangers of the adult world. Her characters are often prototypes of the nation, and their growth from naïveté to wisdom and pain reflect aspects of the national destiny that she sees in the evolving society around her. Oates concerns herself with the formulation of the American Dream and how it has changed and even soured through the decades of American prosperity and preeminence.
In many cases, her stories are crystallized versions of the types of characters and dramatic moments found in larger works over the years, the themes and stylistic approaches in the two genres maintained a parallel progression. Both forms figure centrally in her overall work.
Unlike many writers who produce both long and short fiction, Oates never subordinated her stories to her novels: They represent in sum a no less considerable achievement, and Oates is by no means a novelist who sometimes writes stories, nor for that matter a storyteller who sometimes writes novels. It is difficult to separate Oates’s short fiction from her novels, for she consistently produced volumes in both genres throughout her career. The chiefly rural and small-town milieu of her earlier work expanded over the years, as did her vision of passion and violence in the United States in the twentieth century. Early in her career, she drew comparisons with such predecessors as Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner. Joyce Carol Oates (born June 16, 1938) is a very American writer.
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