Where Is Here Literary Analysis

In “Where Is Here?”, Joyce Carol Oats highlights the theme and idea of infinity through her character's actions and setting. By definition, infinity is the unlimited extent of time, space, or quantity according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary. So what does this have to do with Oats’ story? Well, all throughout the stranger’s visit Oats demonstrates infinity through three aspects of the story: the drawing, the house, and the characters. The first aspect of infinity we see in the story is the stranger’s drawing. During his visit, he offers the boy a “mathematical riddle” which he could take to school and surprise his teacher the next day. When demonstrating the drawing, the stranger explains how “soon you’ll need a magnifying glass to see the details, and then you'll need a microscope, and so on and so forth, forever, laying the triangles neatly down to fit inside the original square”, which in turn seems to fascinate the boy until the father bids the stranger to leave. At this point in the story, Oats brings about the main

While the stranger tours the house, he notes how while everything seems to be modernized, a lot of the furniture and set up is the same, such as the kitchen appliances and the bedroom. When viewing the dining room, the stranger points out the current father’s chair and says “My father was a unique man. Everyone who knew him admired him. He sat here”, and then upon entering the living room he makes a remark how the window seat was “one of my happy places. At least when Father wasn't home”. It seems fairly coincidental for the furniture and the house to be arranged just as how it was when the stranger's family lived there. Oats does this to show the repetition between the two families through all the years separating them. In addition to the setting, Oats uses the characters and their actions to further provide the idea of infinity to her