“Only incidentally about boxing”: Genealogies of Violence in Joyce Carol Oates’s “The Man Who Fought Roland LaStarza”
This article analyzes Joyce Carol Oates’s long story “The Man Who Fought Roland LaStarza,” published in The Museum of Dr. Moses (2007). The text actually presents strong links and echoes with many other pugilistic writings from Oates and others (Oates’s stories, essays, memoirs, interviews are consi...
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| 發表在: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| 主要作者: | |
| 格式: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| 語言: | Anglais |
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Journal of the Short Story in English
2025
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| 在線閱讀: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| 總結: | This article analyzes Joyce Carol Oates’s long story “The Man Who Fought Roland LaStarza,” published in The Museum of Dr. Moses (2007). The text actually presents strong links and echoes with many other pugilistic writings from Oates and others (Oates’s stories, essays, memoirs, interviews are considered). “The Man Who Fought Roland LaStarza” in fact borrows from various genres, making it unique from a generic point of view, but also because of the reflections on violence it contains. One witnesses the physical harshness of the prizefight, but also the psychological and verbal violence inflicted by boxers on their relatives and relations. Boxers become the subject of social and sometimes racial comments and question the audience’s role in the construction of their public image. The boxing event per se is told in a rather linear chronology yet it is a pretext for the narrator, a little girl, to establish her genealogy and discover family secrets which have to be pieced together retrospectively, as they are presented in a nonlinear fashion. The fragmentation of the story in twenty-three unequal parts, interspersed with passages in italics, ellipses, memories and untold facts requires us to re-read the story backwards in order to grasp the clues that lead to the final revelation. Colum Donaghy, the tragic main character with a sharp conscience of impending death, suggests that a backward reading of one’s life will lead to a greater attention to its details, thus providing a guide both for the narrator, the reader, and maybe also the author herself. |
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