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They All Just Went Away Joyce Carol Oates

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“They All Just Went Away” by Joyce Carol Oates is an amazing work. The language used is excellent, the presented descriptive details and events are exact and accurate. However the descriptions of the abandoned houses is upsetting. Still her essay helps the readers to define a family, home and a house and people’s relationships to each other. She did a remarkable job in presenting the stories about particular people and events that happens in each house. This gives the readers the feeling that some of them might have experienced stories. In this essay I will mention two stories that relates to the author’s story. Oates's essay reminds me of my Canadian friend Ashley in sixth grade in Montreal Canada. She was in my art class. Ashley was a quite polite girl. One day, I saw Ashley sitting alone at the back of the …show more content…

So I sat beside her then started making a conversation with her. At that moment, I noticed that she had something hidden in her heart like a secret or something that made her uncomfortable. When I asked her why she looked sad all the time? She told me that she had an alcoholic father. She mentioned that her father was treating them badly, and torturing her mother and her sister. I felt sorry for her because she told me that one day, she had witnessed her father yelling at her mother for some money to buy alcohol. At that time, her mother was screaming and crying, as she couldn’t tolerate being hit by him. Then her mother took her daughters and ran away to her grandmother’s house. Till one day, the father showed up at the grandmother’s house. That moment she saw him from the window in order not be recognized by the mother. As soon as she opened the door he chased her around the house and

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Joyce Carol Oates’s story, “Where Is Here?” is the haunting tale of a family who receives a strange visitor who tours their home claiming to have lived there as a child. The work is incredibly elusive, leaving the reader with many questions by not naming the characters and mentioning many characters that are never seen. Oates leaves her audience in the dark with this work, but she does give them a few clues as to what is really going on. When the visitor first appears, Oates writes “He had not seen the house since January 1949… he thought of it often, dreamed of it often, never more powerfully than in recent months.”

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A search for Independence: A Literary Analysis of Oate’s “Where are you going, Where have you Been?” Joyce Oates wrote the short story, “Where are you going, Where have you been?” in 1966. The story that was inspired by a serial killer who preyed on young girls, became an instant classic. “Where are you going, Where have you Been?” is about a young girl, Connie, who is very self-centered, vain, and focuses on her looks without much regard for anything else.

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