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Life After High School Analysis

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he Lady with the pet Dog, and Life after High School by Joyce Oates both demonstrate satisfactions and frustrations of romantic relationships and dramatizes unhealthy and healthy forms of love in different ways. The similarities between the two stories is greater than the differences when it comes to romantic love, the unhealthy relationship between characters, and the plot’s structure. Joyce Carol Oates’, The Lady With The Pet Dog and Life After High School, both stories have similarities in their characters. They revolve around three main characters and are told in a third person point of view. Life After High School doesn’t uncover any of the characters true feelings or thoughts, and in The Lady With The Pet Dog, the story is limited omniscient, and uncovers Anna’s emotional isolation, depression and desire to find fulfillment in a relationship with a man. The Lady With The Pet Dog’s characters are Anna, her lover, and her husband. Just as in Life After High School there are three main characters; Sunny, Zachary, and Tobias. In The Lady With the Pet Dog, Anna, can’t find fulfilment in her marriage, and only finds pleasure in being with her lover even though her affair also brings thoughts of suicide and feelings of shame and guilt. Zachary can 't find fulfilment in his life and so commits suicide. …show more content…

Joyce Carol Oates vividly explains adolescent and adult life and its traumas. The structure of Life After High School is common, a nerdy teenage boy tries to win the love of a popular cheerleader. Only the story has an unexpected twist, The nerdy boy is homosexual and kills himself for not being able to conform to society’s expectations. Just as The Lady With The Pet Dog’s plot is also common, but not as common as the Life After High School plot. The unexpected twist is the fact that Anna doesn’t commit suicide even though it is more expected from her. The story covers the major phases of Annas adulterous affair with a married man. The chronology of events in The Lady With The Pet Dog is in three sections that overlap and tie up to the present events. The beginning challenges the reader to discern who the characters are and their relationships. The beginning in Life After High School begins with Zachary calling Sunnys name, completely different from how Anna nearly faints when she spots her lover but similar in the sense that they encounter their lovers. The unchronological structure in both stories creates a sense of confusion in the characters relationship with other characters. The structure of the stories reflect the characters state of mind. Zachary desired a traditional relationship with an ideal girl as a way to

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