The Omnipresent Time and Space in Joyce Carol Oates’s The Wheel of Love & Other Stories

Abstract

Joyce Carol Oates, in The Wheel of Love and Other Stories, has depicted the varied nature of love omnipresent in the chaotic times and aptly placed in the prevailing spatial dimensions of the women living in the threatening world around. Love has been presented with different approaches as well as varied forms and visions reflecting the upheaval of the times. The movement of characters back and forth in time and space brings forth the mental dilemmas and adds to the beauty of the stories in this collection. Her characters keep fighting the terrifying battle against time in their quest for attention but are obsessed with the events in their life and are unable to emerge from their past experiences and cravings which haunt them perpetually. The concept of Time and space in literature and its infinite nature has always intrigued the writers and the relative aspects have been a part of various literary studies. The literary text that is situated in a particular time depicts that period and also reflects certain aspects of space related to it which can be real or virtual. The paper examines the temporal and spatial aspects represented in the stories in the short story collection, The Wheel of Love by Joyce Carol Oates.