The Odyssey To Transcendence In The Tragic Shadow

Joyce Carol Oates is one of the most prolific and versatile prominent writers in the contemporary literary circles both in the United States and the world. Till now, she keeps writing, producing a large body of works spanning across the fields of novels, short stories, poetry, plays and essays etc. Oates is reputed as a representative writer of "psychological realism" in the contemporary world of letters. Her novel-You Must Remember This is one of her representative works produced on the dramatic trajectory of her career shifting back to the psychological realistic mode.Both home and foreign critics, more often than not, place this novel under the cloak of such literary theories as naturalism, feminism, psychological analysis, to name a few. Others come to lay emphasis on the poignantly erotic or violent ambience enveloped in the novel. Taking the symbolic signifier of physical space as the focusing lens, and the tragic vision of Oates's as a prop, this thesis aims at analyzing the characters' odyssey to transcendence and exploring the thematic significance projected on the characters' predicament as a result of the loss of communal connection. Chapter One gives an overview of Joyce Carol Oates and her academic achievement, a summary of You Must Remember This, and a literature review. Chapter Two then summarizes the tragic vision of Joyce Carol Oates, which is the backbone of this study. As the key parts of the thesis, the juxtaposition of Chapter Three and Chapter Four parallels the two brothers' vain trajectories to transcendence in their own isolated spaces. This structure spotlights the loneliness and futility of self-exploration due to the loss of connection. Chapter Five extends the thwarted effort of forging brotherhood into a public space. It maps out a larger contour of the characters' predicament. Thus the three-dimensional framework of the tragic vision projected on both the material and psychic space is constructed.