Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (Magill’s Literary Annual 1991-2005)
At a glance:
- Author: Joyce Carol Oates
- First Published: 1990
- Type of Work: Novel
- Time of Work: The 1950’s to the mid-1960’s
- Setting: Upstate New York
- Principal Characters: Iris Courtney, Verlyn “jinx” Fairchild, Cornelius “duke” And Persia Courtney, Leslie Courtney, Alan Savage, Dr. And Mrs. Savage, Woodrow And Minnie Fairchild, Patrick Wesley “liwrle Red” Garlock, Vernon And Vesta Garlock, “Sugar Baby” Fairchild
- Genres: Long fiction
- Subjects: 1950’s, Civil rights, 1960’s, United States or Americans, Racism, Crime or criminals, Murder or homicide, Gender roles, Violence, War, Photography or photographers, Blood, Sports
- Locales: New York
Joyce Carol Oates takes the title of her twentieth—and perhaps most assured and impressive—novel from Stephen Crane’s poetry sequence, “The Black Riders and Other Lines,” wherein the narrator comes upon a creature in the desert who is consuming his own heart and likes it not because it is “good,” but precisely for its bitterness, and because it is his alone. There are many justifiably embittered hearts among Oates’s characters, and if the morally most aware among them hang on tenaciously to their bitterness, it is not from some senseless clinging to their own misery, but...
[The entire page is 2809 words long]
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