The Assassins by Joyce Carol Oates
"The Assassins" by Joyce Carol Oates is a complex and somber novel that delves into themes of death, obsession, and the psychological struggles of its characters. The narrative revolves around the aftermath of the death of Andrew Petrie, a former senator, and is explored through the perspectives of his widow Yvonne and his brothers, Hugh and Stephen. Each character grapples with their grief and the existential crises that arise from Andrew's absence, leading to a dissection of their fractured relationships and identities.
Hugh, a cynical political cartoonist, becomes consumed by his brother’s death, spiraling into paranoia and failure in both personal and professional realms. Yvonne, isolated by her husband's demise, oscillates between attempting to uncover potential threats and engaging in unfulfilling affairs, ultimately succumbing to her own despair. Stephen, the youngest brother, faces a crisis of faith, causing him to question his religious convictions and familial ties as he navigates the tumultuous emotional landscape created by Andrew's death.
The novel is structured in three parts, each offering a distinct viewpoint and contributing to an overarching narrative that suggests the characters are, in a sense, their own assassins. The interplay of memory, conjecture, and reality adds layers of mystery and psychological depth, challenging readers to piece together the truth amidst the characters' fragmented perceptions. Oates's exploration of philosophical themes and the limitations of human connection invites reflection on the nature of existence and the profound effects of loss.
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The Assassins by Joyce Carol Oates
Excerpted from an article in Magill’s Survey of American Literature, Revised Edition
First published: 1975
Type of work: Novel
The Work
The Assassins: A Book of Hours is perhaps Oates’s darkest and most pessimistic novel. It takes its subtitle from a canonical book that ends with the Office of the Dead, and it is concerned with characters mourning or obsessed with death.
The four characters central to the novel are Andrew Petrie, a former senator from New York and outspoken political observer; his brothers Hugh and Stephen; and his widow, Yvonne. Andrew himself is dead and appears only through memory or flashback; Hugh, Yvonne, and Stephen provide the viewpoints for the three parts of the novel, which are accordingly named for them.
“Hugh” begins enigmatically, and only later does it become evident that his diffuse and convoluted first-person narrative takes place within his conscious mind as he lies inexpressive and paralyzed in a hospital bed. Hugh is a bitter and sardonic political cartoonist who has devoted his life to hating and lampooning all that his successful older brother represents. His character—greedy, impotent, hypochondriac, alcoholic—is expressed through his obsessive rantings as he recounts his experience during the year following Andrew’s death. Without Andrew, Hugh’s life lacks the pivot on which it had turned. Consumed with a desire to discover his brother’s assassins and convinced that Yvonne holds the key, he embarks on a maniacal pursuit of her and ends up a professional and romantic failure—even failing in his dramatically staged but essentially comic attempt at suicide.
Yvonne, the object of Hugh’s deluded affections, is left completely isolated by her husband’s death. Assisting the police, she draws up a list of Andrew’s potential enemies, but the list is really an emblem of her own paranoia, for she views all others as her personal enemies and recedes further into her own private world. Having immersed herself completely in Andrew’s intellectual life and their marriage, she strives after his death to continue his work, but soon that also loses meaning. She engages in casual affairs with various men connected with Andrew, but she is both frigid and incapable of bringing her lovers pleasure. Part 2, “Yvonne,” ends with a violent scenario of Yvonne’s death at the hands of ax-wielding assassins.
“Stephen” focuses on the youngest Petrie brother, who experienced a religious awakening as a teenager, dissociated himself completely from his family and its wealth, and has been living in a religious retreat. His last meeting with Andrew was a fiery one, and Andrew’s death now challenges the peace Stephen has found by forcing him to acknowledge himself as a Petrie. In attending the funeral, in meeting with Hugh in New York and Yvonne in Albany, the firmness of his Jesuit foundation begins to disintegrate, and he finds himself deprived of his sense of God, and with it his sense of himself. He becomes an aimless and ever-accommodating drifter.
The three parts of the novel treat the same events, encounters, and revelations through three disparate perceptions; together they suggest an objective account of events and define the limitations of the individual personalities. The novel abounds in carefully wrought detail and corroboration, and it is populated with a world of other characters: the Petries’ father, a ruthless judge now in retirement; their sister Doris, a plump suburban busybody; their cousin Pamela, a superficial society woman; their cousin Harvey, Andrew’s cutthroat rival; Andrew’s sensuous first wife, Willa, and brilliant son Michael; Hugh’s psychoanalysts, Drs. Wynand and Swann; and the mysterious Raschke, a political activist from both Yvonne’s and Stephen’s pasts.
There is an element of mystery throughout The Assassins, for Hugh’s desire to locate Andrew’s assassins renders all the characters suspect and creates expectations that the murder will be solved at the end of the novel. The title and the mystery are misleading, however, for Oates’s “assassins” are the characters themselves, who, through their obsessions and limited vision, unwittingly murder themselves and one another. It is even intimated that Andrew’s death, on which so much depends, was not an assassination at all but a carefully disguised suicide.
The Assassins is a challenging novel, for Oates demands that the reader join together the disparate elements of the story. Though the three sections are expressed through three different temperaments, they all have a staccato, nearly stream-of-consciousness flow which can blend memory, conjecture, dream, imagination, and physical reality into a single stratum of experience. Thus, certain issues are unclear: Hugh’s condition at the outset, the circumstances of Andrew’s death, and whether Yvonne’s brutal murder is real or imagined.
Such questions fade beneath the psychic weight of the novel. Philosophically, the work shows the influence of the American philosopher William James, whose The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) may have suggested a thematic model. James was concerned with the tyranny of pluralism and the inability of individuals to connect. The Assassins portrays three philosophical approaches—Hugh reduces all to two dimensions, ridiculing it; Yvonne reduces all to reason, sterilizing it; and Stephen reduces all to God, subsuming it in mystery—and all the approaches fail, leaving the characters trapped within their own egos. They deny necessary aspects of reality, thereby denying the possibility of love, and effectively assassinate any real life that exists within.
Bibliography
Bender, Eileen Teper. Joyce Carol Oates: Artist in Residence. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Cologne-Brookes, Gavin. Dark Eyes on America: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.
Creighton, Joanne V. Joyce Carol Oates: Novels of the Middle Years. New York: Twayne, 1992.
Daly, Brenda O. Lavish Self-Divisions: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.
Johnson, Greg. Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Dutton, 1998.
Johnson, Greg. Understanding Joyce Carol Oates. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987.
Wagner-Martin, Linda, ed. Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979.