Joyce Carol Oates has written several short stories on the concept of pain and body. She has pictured human body in all its different forms and circumstances. She reveals pain as it truly is within the course of events in her stories. Pain has become an inseparable element of her stories. How can body be separated from pain when there are always pains to affect the body irredeemably? Diseases, injuries, operations and voluntarily modifications are among the reasons that cause pain in different forms such as acute or chronic, neuropathic, visceral, somatic and nociceptive pains. Human bodies, although treated differently as male or female, black or white, healthy or diseased and strong or weak, are all subjects to pain in the same way. The differences in bodies range from injured and tormented bodies, diseased bodies, gendered bodies and reproducing bodies to modified and deformed bodies. This study aims to find to what extent Oates has been successful in representing bodies and pains, to what extent her approach to pain overlaps the scientific approach and what possible therapeutic effects are presented in her fictional world. She has provided evidence for each type of pain she introduces, and this study has gone into the details of the stories to highlight the evidence and adjust it with the reality and the scientific theories of pain. For this study Oates’s collections of short stories in different periods of time have been used in order to have a glance at her work during the different eras of her work and not just a specific time or collection. The collections studied in this research are: I Am No One You Know (2005), Dear Husband (2010), Sourland (2010), The Corn Maiden (2011), Black Dahlia and White Rose (2012), Lovely, Dark, Deep (2014), and High Crime Area (2014), Night Gaunts and Other Tales of Suspense (2018).
