SOURCE: Zapf, Hubert. “Aesthetic Experience and Ideological Critique in Joyce Carol Oates's ‘Master Race’.” The International Fiction Review 16, no. 1 (1989): 48-55.

In the following essay, Zapf delineates the three main aspects of the aesthetic composition of Oates's “Master Race.”

Cecilia Heath, the protagonist and narrative voice of Joyce Carol Oates's short story “Master Race,”¹ is a 34-year-old art critic who accompanies the renowned Professor of European History Philip Schoen on a three-week trip to Europe. Philip, an American of German origin, who is married and 53, is sent there by the “Peekskill Foundation for Independent Research in the Arts, Sciences, and the Humanities” (568) to interview potential Fellows of the Foundation. The story concentrates on a few days that Cecilia and Philip spend in Mainz, West Germany. Its central event is the rape of Cecilia by a young black American soldier, with which the story begins, and which psychologically recurs in...