Response to “Lethal” and the Devastating Promise of “a little”

As intended, I found this monologue by Joyce Carol Oates to be extremely disturbing. Of course the content itself makes it so, however, it is the voice of the speaker Oates has created that completes the horrific picture and brings it to life. The speaker’s wheedling, almost childlike insistence, his attempts to convince the person he is victimizing that what he wants is harmless, that he will only do “a little,” take “a little” is nauseating (Oates 71). The way Oates builds the tension, the violation through the speaker’s voice, and how she charts the speaker’s progress, his decimation of boundaries, are both terribly effective. The manipulative language the speaker uses throughout, such as when he states “It won’t hurt if you don’t scream but you’ll be hurt if you keep straining away like that, if you exaggerate” reveals the way in which he does further damage (71). The speaker attempts to paint his aggression as slight and the one who he’s victimizing as somehow irrational in her resistance to him. In these moments, Oates brings the reader into the unconscionable dialogue between the speaker and the person he is traumatizing. Finally, the way in which the speaker converts himself into the victim, and the person he is violating into the aggressor, completes the betrayal, and gives us a horrible glimpse into his psyche. “You’re being selfish,” Oates writes, “You’re being ridiculous… cruel… unfair…. hysterical…. You’re provoking me… laughing at me…. You want to make me fight for my life…” (71). The speaker is real in all his horror; the person he has traumatized is real in all their experience and pain. Oates has created a monologue where even the monstrous is made tangible, because she has forced us to see into its mind. There is no comforting distance to be had. Oates has made us confront a horror living in our society and refused to let us leave it unacknowledged.