Oates, Joyce Carol - Robert McPhillips (essay date 1994)
Robert McPhillips (essay date 1994)
SOURCE: McPhillips, Robert. “The Novellas of Joyce Carol Oates.” In Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction, edited by Greg Johnson, pp. 194-201. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.
[In the following essay, McPhillips surveys the central thematic concerns of Oates's early novellas.]
The most successful of Oates's early novellas is the first. Triumph of the Spider Monkey (1976) focuses on the life of a man, the “maniac” Bobbie Gotteson, born not to privilege but to squalor. Indeed, in the gruesomely ironic first chapter, the infant Bobbie, in a parody of Christ's birth, is found in a locker, “held up to the lights and declared Still alive in the Trailways Bus Terminal on Canal Street, New York City, New York, as good a place as any.”1 Such a mechanical “birth,” coupled with the chapter's title, “Nativity,” suggests that Oates is operating on an...
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