Comic Nihilism in Expensive People by Joyce Carol Oates: The Self-invention through the Lens of Postmodern Nietzsche

This article discusses the aesthetics of self-invention in light of a postmodern reading of Nietzsche in Expensive People (1970) by Nobel Prize nominee Joyce Carol Oates (1938- ). In contrast to the innocent heroine of Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland texts that influenced the imagery of Oates’ second text of her Wonderland Quartet, the protagonist in Expensive People is a young boy whose innocence is playfully turned into violence to advance the chaotic setting of the postmodern narrative. The philosophical logic behind both of Carroll’s books and Oates’ Wonderland Quartet resembles the postmodern sentiment that appropriates by Friedrich Nietzsche’s principle of identity after the proclamation of the death of God. Albeit the dramatisation of the philosophical conflict of the death of God and the subsequent aspect of nihilist erasure, the postmodern reading of Expensive People unfolds the aestheticisation of decentralisation.