Hurtful Love

Narratology is a new branch of subject emerging in the mass of literary criticism in20century. The development of its theory never breaks off, but vigorously expands instead. It offers theoretical framework to scientifically understand narrative works.Structure and theme are expressed in The Wheel of Love and Other Stories, a representative story collection of distinguished American novelist Joyce Carol Oates, based on the theory of narratology in combination with such artistic techniques as symbolism and irony. Themes in Oates’works, as a matter of fact, have always been focused on in previous studies. However, they are confined to the categories in which they are violence, grotesque, tragic thought and feminism and so on. This present study differs from others for that story theme and structure-duality are vividly and incisively shown in The Wheel of Love and Other Stories relying on the theory of narratology, symbolism and irony as well. The employment of techniques such as multi-viewpoint types, multi-faceted symbolism and multi-layered irony contributes a lot to successfully exploring the structure and conveying the theme of such collection.The theme shown in The Wheel of Love and Other Stories is an incisive reflection of the circumstances in the society at that time.