SOURCE: Trachtenberg, Stanley. “Desire, Hypocrisy, and Ambition in Academe: Joyce Carol Oates's Hungry Ghosts.” In The American Writer and the University, edited by Ben Siegel, pp. 39-53. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Trachtenberg provides a thematic analysis of the seven stories in The Hungry Ghosts.

“The difficulty with stories, even true ones,” one of Joyce Carol Oates's characters complains, “is that they begin nowhere and end nowhere.”¹ In place of recognizable structure, Oates has relied on just such narrative aimlessness to project the obsessive confusions troubling midcentury America; these include “a confusion of love and money, of the categories of public and private experience, of a demonic urge … an urge to violence as the answer to all problems, an urge to self-annihilation, suicide, the ultimate experience and the ultimate surrender.”² Though Oates has claimed that violence is always an affirmation, she is disdainful of...