Where Is Here? By Joyce Carol Oates

In “Where is Here?” Joyce Carol Oates brings up the idea of infinity through a few different elements: the drawing that the visitor makes for the son, the house itself, and the characters. These all, in some way, represent infinity and the way life continues on forever and how it often reflects the past. When the visitor meets the son, he offers to show him a mathematical riddle. He draws a square and then a triangle inside the square. He continues to draw triangles within the drawing, making sure their points don’t coincide. The visitor mentions that at some point you’ll need a magnifying glass and eventually a microscope to notice the details. He also stresses that fact that the points never coincide. This represents infinity in the sense that life infinitely exists and continuously repeats itself, and that elements of the past are reflected later on in life. These duplicated details of life can’t occur at the same time and the similarities may eventually become so small overtime that you have to look very closely to realize they are there.
Just as with the drawing, two identical lives or families can’t exist, or coincide, within the same time and the same place. Only this family lives in this house at the present moment, but the visitor once lived there and someone before him as well. Once this family leaves, another one will take their place. When looking around the house, the visitor notices that not only are some of the details of the house similar to when he lived there, but the atmosphere of certain areas of the house as well; the windowpane he used to sit on, the master bedroom, his childhood room, the basement. After the visitor left and the mother and father got into an argument, the color appeared to drain from the walls, as if the happiness was diminishing from the