Excerpt

Most scholars view Oates as a writer of fatalism and pessimism. My depiction of Oates in the preceding pages is that of an optimist, a literary artist who evokes hopeful possibility amid patent despair and desperation. I have postulated that the tragedy lies less in fate than in personages. Oates's protagonists are tragic, because they make wrong choices. The issue of why they unwittingly choose a tragic destiny constitutes the motivating all-pervasive philosophical basis for Oates's writings. Other Oates critics descry a closed world of fatal impossibility. As I have suggested is true for Yeats, Oates is less interested in the evil and suffering of protagonists she portrays than in laying bare the ills of contemporary society. My critical contribution is in suggesting that Oates's apostolic mission as a writer is to demonstrate a need for social reform, not to illustrate the validity of Sartrean existentialist philosophy. I delve into the nuanced political unconsciousness in Oates's writings by calling attention to metaphorical evocations of anachronistic myths that still motivate her archetypal denizens in a postmodern era. Oates does not oppose the modern. Quite to the contrary, her protagonists, like Hemingway's Santiago and Kafka's K, venture beyond boundaries. While attempting to create order, they get trapped by Faustian obsessions. Oates's writings suggest that we all have a classroom. For some it is in an ivory tower of erudition, but for many, it is in the world in which we live. Oates is post-Nietzschean in the implicit question she raises, especially in her novelettes: Is God really dead? Oates instills in her readers an increased awareness of the impact of societal forces that shape any individual's sense of selfhood. Oates is an edifying author, because she evokes elemental, driving forces that shape an individual, a nation, indeed, a world.