‘Heat’, by Joyce Carol Oates
Read it here in about 20 minutes.
Thinking about why I love it…
The story builds up in layers, right from the very first paragraph, adding detail as it moves forward. So, you’re given information about the time of year, the place, the twins, the fact they’re dead… Then, more information about the heat, more information about the twins, more about their deaths… The story is told in a stop-start way, with lots of short sentences, and lots of parataxic sentences (‘The room was crowded; there was only one way in and out.’) – this gives the quality of memories being told in a stream of consciousness. The layers seem to mimic the ripples created by the summer humidity, because we keep coming back to the same ideas (e.g. the sameness of the twins; their deaths; the heat), and the selection of these specific details creates links between them, for example repeatedly referring to the heat makes it seem as though the heat is in some way also responsible for the twins’ deaths.
The narrator flits between first-person singular (‘I couldn’t say why’) and first-person plural (‘We went to see them in the funeral parlor’); in both grammatical persons, the narrator takes on an observer role, relaying thoughts and impressions of the girls and the aftermath of their murder, rather than any personal interactions with the twins. The narrator is unemotional about the deaths (‘In the caskets the dead girls did not look like anyone we knew, really’), while also trying hard to make her meaning clear to the reader, to avoid misunderstandings (‘He died there… and was brought back home to be buried–the body of him, I mean. His earthly remains.’). She’s telling the story as an adult, but it happened when she was a child – perhaps this need to be specific about details is because she wants to atone for the jealousy she initially felt towards the dead girls, and her childish attitude towards death at the time (‘We liked it that Rhea and Rhoda had been killed’)?
Oates breaks some rules in her telling of this story. For example, there are many times when she uses the general ‘you’ (e.g. ‘newsprint on your fingers’) – this is something my MA tutor would have pulled me up on, but when Oates does this it draws the reader in, so they become a member of the town community, and experience being there. Also, she puts details into paragraphs together, when they need to be in separate paragraphs because they’re about separate topics (e.g. There were three floor fans in the funeral parlor that I could see, tall whirring fans with propeller blades turning fast to keep the warm air moving. … By this time Roger Whipple was arrested, taken into police custody. No one had hurt him.’) – but, as I already said, linking these details grammatically links them in terms of meaning, too.
The story ends with speculation about what happened in Rhoda’s final moments. The narrator can speculate about what Rhoda said and did, because she knew her; she can speculate about Roger Whipple, because she knows how men like him can behave (‘some things you know’). But the reader is never told the awful details of the twins’ deaths, and they live on in the narrator’s childhood memories.
Mina Ma 