Word: hideously
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Oates' point seems to be that when grand existential problems are embodied in real people, they take the form of mental disease. Philosophical dilemmas are noble in the abstract, but in reality they twist people into hideous shapes. Night-Side seems to be an indictment of philosophers on behalf of ordinary people. But in that case, why doesn't Oates show any sympathy for all these ordinary, tortured people? Although she describes her characters with inhuman intelligence. Oates never shows the slightest hint of compassion for them. Her identification of existential despair and mental illness is not so much...
...slightest disturbance?the closing of a door, a sudden aroma, the switching on of a light?can be devastating. As Dr. John B. Brainard explains, "The ache becomes an intolerable, overwhelming force, driving you to bed, away from people, away from the world, away from everything except the hideous pain inside your head...
...history" must exist there: "Somewhere on the periphery of that total Viet Nam issue whose daily reports made the morning papers too heavy to bear, lost in the surreal contexts of television, there was a story that was as simple as it had always been, men hunting men. a hideous war and all kinds of victims...
...known to the older hands as Mother Russia." Fawn, Smiley's recessive factotum and "scalp hunter"?professional killer; Craw, an old China hand of archbishoprical speech and mien, shamelessly based on the form and choler of Sunday Times Correspondent Richard Hughes: "We colonize them. Your Graces ... we are hideous not only in their sight, Monsignors, but in their nostrils." Ricardo, the mercenary Mexican pilot: " 'How it happened,' he said. 'Listen, I tell you how it happened.' And then I'll kill you, said his eyes." Smaller roles are no less memorable: "My minor characters are always getting...
...crafty murderess Velma Keily, "The Girls" admit to the rather hideous murders of various husbands, lovers and cheaters with the cruel excuse "They had it coming, they had it coming." Roxie fears all is lost until she is taken under the wing of the ward matron Mama, who for a small fee, is pleased to point her in the direction of a cunning and flashy lawyer named Billy Flynn...