Word: characterizes
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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The characters in Night-Side, Oates' latest collection of stories, lie on the boundary between existential despair and actual insanity. They are too sick to be tragic, but they are normal enough for us to recognize ourselves in them. The heroine of "The Snowstorm," for example, is a young woman...
Oates uses madness as a symbol for a peculiar kind of corruption in the soul. Her characters are not hateful because of anything that they do; they are not even guilty of the usual existentialist sins of cowardice and self-deception. On the contrary, they bravely confront problems which most...
The protagonist of "Lover," for example, is a young doctor who becomes obsessed with a mad girl who was brought to his hospital one night battered and raped. The girl seems to symbolize for him the void that underlies his cozy bourgeois life. If it were not for one small...
William Gibson has written this play on the accordion principle. So many flash backs, so much research, such fragmentary and confusing changes of locale have been squeezed together that the show unfolds in minute pleats rather than full-bodied scenes. The only substantial character in the play is Golda, played...
Or such has been the case up until The Goodbye Girl, a film that reveals a Richard Dreyfuss we have not seen before. This romantic comedy is a rather modest entertainment, but it forces its star to open up by placing him in a role that demands a generosity of...