In the story of “Naked” by Joyce C. Oates, a nameless woman endures a violent attack on her hike through the wildlife preserve. As she begins her journey towards home, the impact of the assault takes a difficult and deeper form of recognition: Vulnerable, and left naked without any covering, exposed, like many people having to face the truth in those unexpected events of life. Everyone has a point in life where there is a fork in the road and a coming to terms with defining who we are and trying to understand our purpose, what are we to do? She is starting to contemplate, where does she belong, and why has she been hiding for so long? Being violently stripped of all the coverings, titles of wife, mother, and working professional, who lived in University Heights, and of course the reputation of her husband, however, what does it really …show more content…
“She should never have married, she was thinking. She’d been happiest alone. The effort of hypocrisy wearied her.”(Oates, 137) Nevertheless, her present life according to her emotional upheaval represented a fallacy, she just realize how tired she was, consequently the sexual assault turned her wildlife hike into a journey to self-realization of deciding what road she was going to travel now.
Chapter 26 of Foster speaks of the signifier, “It’s a sign used in a way other than intended one. So are others. What is a sign? It’s something that signifies a message. The thing that’s doing the signifying, call it the signifier, that’s stable. The message, on the other hand, the thing being signified, that’s up for grabs. The signifier, in other words, while being fairly stable itself, doesn’t have to be used in the planned way. Its meaning can be deflected from the expected meaning”. (Foster,