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Joyce Carol Oates appears to be a very innocent woman. Her small face surrounded by large glasses and thinning soft brown curls adds to her frailty. This outside appearance, however, fools most people who have not read anything by her. Her wri ....

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... being powerless to change things. But her works do more than merely chronicle the horrors of the sixties and early seventies, they are efforts to raise the consciousness of ordinary people to the realization of the destruction of their lives, to ‘show us how to get through and transcend pain,’ to encourage us to continue the struggle to put some meaning into human life’ "(Grant, qtd. in www.kutztown). Oates writes stories concerning common American obsessions such as love, money, and evil. She portrays men as either very brutal or very weak, while the women in her stories are usually victims. If not a victim of assault or rape, the women f ...