"Lethal" - Joyce Carol Oates

“Lethal” by Joyce Carol Oates was the piece that grabbed me the most this week. At first, it seemed like a letter to a lover, but then it changed into something menacing and, well, lethal. This piece is a roller coaster of emotion. It starts off loving and tender. It then becomes more aggressive with the line, “I just want to measure your skeleton with my arms.” I don’t think a declaration of love would include skeletons, which are associated with death. That was the first time I thought there was something off about the narrator. The narrator then becomes persistent and uses visceral imagery. The line, “It won’t hurt if you don’t scream but you’ll be hurt if you keep straining away like that, if you exaggerate,” is the point when I realized the narrator was raping this woman. After this line, I feel like we take a nosedive into the narrator’s psyche and it’s completely terrifying. It’s terrifying because it goes from what he wants to what he thinks the woman thinks of him and what she wants to do to him. He turns himself into the victim and turns the victim into the attacker. He fights for his life by raping her; that’s his way of defending himself from her supposed attack. He is a completely unreliable narrator because any person who saw this happening would see that he’s attacking her, but he thinks it’s the other way around. I think that’s what makes this piece so chilling; it’s the fact that everyone can see his narration is unreliable, but to him it’s the complete truth.