Joyce Carol Oates's short story "...& Answers" is about a woman who believes wholeheartedly in male superiority to the complete detriment of herself and the women around her. Told entirely through a question and answer session with a psychologist, the protagonist of the story details her unwavering trust in men (“I believe anything men tell me and I always did") and how men should best not “expect too much” of women. The events of the story happen after a car accident has killed the woman's daughter, Linda. Whether or not the woman crashed the car on purpose is not clear, as she asks her psychologist “Are you asking me if I killed her?" In other words, "...& Answers" is a story that asks whether a woman’s deprecation of her own gender could be so violent that she would kill her own daughter?
So how could a woman...
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become so self-hateful? The woman herself has a brilliant mind—her high school grades attest to that—but nevertheless, the woman believes (and tries to convince the psychologist) that she is nothing special. As the story progresses, it is shown that she was abandoned by her father, but this is not a satisfying answer either as to why she harbors so much self-hatred. These are common themes in Joyce Carol Oates’s stories: the pain of being female and how women are crippled by lifelong self-deprecation. It is not so much a question, then, of how this state of mind happens but rather a question of showing the hellish nature of living when you hate yourself and believe yourself inferior to others.
Joyce Carol Oates's short story "...& Answers" is told in the form of
answers a mental-health patient gives to questions posed by psychologist. The
central theme in the story concerns the repressed fear
of being abandoned by her father the protagonist and narrator has felt
all her life.
The protagonist has just gone to see a psychologist because she is struggling
with her grief over the death of her daughter. As she talks, repressed
emotions about her father surface. She claims that,
while he was alive, she had felt he was like a stranger, yet when he disappears
from her life forever, she lastingly suffers from fears of abandonment. Her
father had lied to his family by saying he was leaving for a fishing trip; the
truth was, he was leaving to be hospitalized for an operation. Sadly, he dies
during the operation, and his family members do not get the chance to say
goodbye. Instead, they are left feeling hurt because he lied to them and
feeling abandoned.
As the story progresses, we learn that the protagonist projects her
feelings of distrust and abandonment onto all men. We also learn she
is having difficulty recovering from her grief over the loss of her daughter
because is projecting the loss of her father onto the loss of her daughter,
reliving her father's death all over again. Hence, all in all, the short story
is an analysis of human psychology and the detrimental effects
of both emotional pain and repressed emotions.