After The Wreck One Flew Away Character Analysis

The use of characterization in the novel After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away by Joyce Carol Oates is portraying a young adolescent who has a life changing experience. Oates has been able to succeed in creating very complex narratives that invite adolescents to think deeply about the trials that the characters experience throughout the novels. Oates expresses the reality of presence of evil (Bender 13).

Joyce Carol Oates is numerously compared and contrasted with Eudora Welty, William Faulkner, John Steinbeck and Theodore Dreiser. Even Flannery O’Connor (Bender 13). In the novel After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away, Oates shows a character named Jenna Abbott. In the novel, Jenna

and her mother (and best friend) get in a wreck and her mother is killed. The wreck doesn’t kill Jenna but does make her bed ridden. Throughout the novel, Jenna has become a rebelling, twisted, convoluted teen.
Several of Oates novels and short stories are based off of true real life events that have occurred, some in crimes or unsolved murders. For example, in My Sister, My Love the main characters younger sister is murdered in their own home and what little evidence is found is tampered with, this being based off the murder of Jonbenet Ramsey. Oates does the same type of style in After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away with the character Jenna Abbott.
In Oates writings the majority of her characters have a pessimistic outlook. For example, in After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away, Jenna Abbott has a life changing experience at the beginning of the novel and this turns her life into a complete downhill spiral. Oates seems to mainly focus on problematic young adults. In her novels the characters are faced with life changing events but eventually power through it. “See, people come into your life for a reason. They might not know it themselves, why. You might not know it. But there's a reason. There has to be” (par. 94).
In conclusion, Joyce Carol Oates is a very pessimistic author. Throughout her novels readers come to find that all of her novels are about a real life tragedy that has happened. Whether it turn their life for the downhill spiral, as read in After the Wreck, I Picked Myself Up, Spread My Wings, and Flew Away.