Nietzsche and Joyce Carol Oates: Nietzschean Themes in The Wonderland Quartet

Nietzsche and Joyce Carol Oates explores the American novelist’s The Wonderland Quartet through a reading of the German philosopher’s seminal works. In the four books of The Wonderland Quartet - A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Expensive People (1968), the National Book Award-winning Them (1969), and Wonderland (1971) - Oates aestheticizes cultural experiments after the Nietzschean proclamation of God is dead permeated American culture from about 1950. What may be delineated as Oates’s original literary scholarship is her ability to reflect on the cultural reception of Walter Kaufmann’s work on Nietzsche in her fiction, while enabling her characters to find their purposes. Echoing Nietzsche, her characters are not limited by normative standards. The author’s narrative techniques allow her characters’ polyphonic voices to dominate the flow.