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Harriet Zink: The Night Nurse in Joyce C. Oates' "The Night Nurse"

Harriet Zink: The Night Nurse in Joyce C. Oates' "The Night Nurse"

Life's experiences have a way of making or breaking a person. How we handle the trials we face makes us bitter or better. Harriet Zink, in Joyce Carol Oates' "The Night Nurse," has certainly had her share of hardship. However, the compassion we feel for her is overshadowed by disgust for who she has let herself become. Although it is admirable for her to have overcome such obstacles, Harriet is now a skeptical, merciless, and vengeful woman, who fails to generate our sympathies.
Our first impression of Harriet is negative: we are introduced to her "flat, nasal, ironic voice" (Oates 660). We sit uncomfortably through her belittling of Grace Burkhardt, and endure her ill treatment of the woman, to be rewarded with a fuller picture of Harriet's background...suffering at the hands of more fortunate schoolmates, one of which was Grace. The reader can sympathize with Harriet, who "cried [herself] to sleep ...

Posted by: Melissa T. Littlefield

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