Joyce Carol Oates’ “The Rooster” and “Happy Chicken”: Two very different versions of her life at age five, the latter narrated not by Oates, but by the chicken.

Persons with multiple personality may give multiple versions of their own lives, because some personalities have memory gaps (dissociative amnesia) for things that other personalities remember, and each personality has its own point of view.

The version given in “The Rooster Attacked Me — and Yet I Loved Him” (1) is very different from the version given in “Happy Chicken 1942-1944,” the second chapter of Oates’s memoir, The Lost Landscape (2).

The “Happy Chicken” chapter, both very funny and very psychologically complex, should be read in the original, but here is my brief note from a past post (search “Oates”):

Dissociative Amnesia at Age Five

The chapter “Happy Chicken” has a different narrator from most of the memoir. Here, Joyce Carol Oates is usually referred to by the narrator as “the little girl.” When the little girl was five years old, she was allowed to help “the Grandmother” collect eggs on their family farm. The narrator says:

“Grandma was the one, you know. The one who killed the chickens.

No! I did not know.

Of course you must have known, Joyce. You must have seen—many times…

No. I didn’t know. I never saw.

But…

I never saw” (2, p. 27).

“Sometime the little girl was breathless and frightened but why, the little girl would not afterward recall” (2, p. 29).

This alternate narrator—in the rhetorical, humorous guise of Joyce’s pet chicken, Happy Chicken—may be an alternate personality who knew things that little Joyce did not want to remember, like who killed the cute, innocent chickens on their family farm.

1. Joyce Carol Oates. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/05/17/magazine/the-rooster-attacked-me-and-yet-i-loved-him.html

2. Joyce Carol Oates. The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age. New York, ecco/HarperCollins, 2015.