Fox

“Saying, My darling there will never be a time when our souls are not joined.

Saying, Our (secret) pledge will be, we will die for each other if that is asked of us.

We will never reveal our secret, we will die together & our secret will die with us.”

This quote, from one of Fox’s female students, shows how persuasive his remarks are. He frames the experience between himself and his target as epic, discussing a relationship that exists beyond boundaries of society and time. Further, he establishes a sense of familiarity, indicating that his and his target’s souls are intimately tied together even in death. This glamourizes death as a solution if the affair is exposed.

“[Of] course she understands that her human is her salvation, but her human, though sharp-eyed and often capable of reading her mind is not here to observe, and so for the time being she has forgotten her human, when a human is not here to observe it is only natural to forget the human.”

Oates narrates from Princess Di’s perspective as the dog enters the woods, leaving civilization behind. Even though she is grateful to P. Cady for giving her a home, as she drives into the wilderness, she goes back to her most feral self. Princess Di is symbolic of Fox, who is only on his best behavior when people observe him.

“It was his strategy, as soon as possible in the new term, to determine which girls, if they were attractive, were fatherless. For a fatherless girl is an exquisite rose on a branch lacking thorns, there for the picking; but a girl with a father in the family was, Francis Fox had learned from experience, so fully protected, she might as well be a rose surrounded by thorns that is also surrounded by a barbed wire fence, off-limits.”

Here, Fox shows that he thinks about threats to the success of his predatory behavior. The close third-person perspective here mimics the narrative voice of Princess Di, highlighting the animalistic nature of Fox’s calculations as he chooses his targets. Though he implies that he will consider the girls with fathers off limits, this is a good example of the kind of self-imposed rule that Fox breaks consistently.