SOURCE: McPhillips, Robert. “The Novellas of Joyce Carol Oates.” In Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction, edited by Greg Johnson, pp. 194-201. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994.

In the following essay, McPhillips surveys the central thematic concerns of Oates's early novellas.

The most successful of Oates's early novellas is the first. Triumph of the Spider Monkey (1976) focuses on the life of a man, the “maniac” Bobbie Gotteson, born not to privilege but to squalor. Indeed, in the gruesomely ironic first chapter, the infant Bobbie, in a parody of Christ's birth, is found in a locker, “held up to the lights and declared Still alive in the Trailways Bus Terminal on Canal Street, New York City, New York, as good a place as any.”¹ Such a mechanical “birth,” coupled with the chapter's title, “Nativity,” suggests that Oates is operating on an allegorical as well as a realistic...