Rhetorical Analysis: Jules, Nadine, and a little bit of foreshadowing...

Some background before I present my Analysis: Nadine and Jules are two characters in the novel with a bit more crazy in them then the other characters. They'd met after Jule's boss, who was her uncle, was randomly stabbed to death. Yet their first meeting was a bit more unconventional than that. After his boss died, Jules worked for a flower delivery company in Detroit, all the while obsessing over this mysterious girl he saw at his boss' brother's house. He decided one day to find her, and he did. At her parent's house that he broke into. After already being turned away. Twice. He professed his love for her, she professed her desire to leave her home, and they ran away together into the sunset. For about a month. Then, when he became ill one day in Middle-of-Nowhere, Texas, she left him, taking the car with her. They were both still in their teens. Then, after many years, Jule's found her again. She was married, beautiful, and, apparently, in love with him. You can believe that Jules loved her too. After the following passage, which I so beautifully analyzed, Nadine and Jules spend a weekend together in an apartment she rented "catching up". Then, when Jules attempts to leave, Nadine follows him out onto the street and then shoots them both, point blank. I found this to be romantic, in a Romeo-and-Juliet kind of way. Tragic, but poetic in the hands of Joyce Carol Oates. Though the image is shattered when you find that neither one of them die. That's how "To Whose Country Have I Come?" ends. Now without further ado...

"The apartment she (she is Nadine. Jule's already married lover) had rented was on the fifth floor of an old apartment building near Palmer Park. It was made of dark red brick, heavy and pompous, with small useless balconies of wrought iron. The balconies were symbolic, ceremonial. At the four corners of the building were grimy turrets, inexplicable. (The imagery provided by the description of the apartment building is dark and ominous. It doesn't exactly give you the impression that Jule's tryst with Nadine is going to go well. If anything, it signals some impeding doom... the number four, as in the four corners of the building, signifies something solid, something real. The inexplicable-ness of the the "grimy turrets" symbolizes the unknown, as does his lack of knowledge of architecture, seen in the next sentence.)To Jules they had a military look, but he knew nothing about architecture and could not have said what they were or what they had once been, in another century. They made him apprehensive. (Jule's apprehension shows that he must have some underlying feeling of unrest. This apprehension is seen throughout the rest of his time with Nadine, following this passage.) Only pigeons fluttered heavily about them, but he expected to see the nervous movement of weapons. His chest flinched at the thought of such death. Did he want to die shot down, or did he want to die in a hospital bed like his uncle? (This is a very important rhetorical question. It is a very obvious foreshadowing of Nadine shooting Jules at the end of 'To Whose Country Have I Come?'. He didn't have a choice as to how he would die. The irony is, not only did he not die after being shot point blank by his "one true love", he also experienced both being shot down and a long stay in a hospital bed during his recovery from BEING shot.) His imagination had been heated by the memory of movies, stark black-and-white deaths of men shot down; it was the price that had to be paid for being important. Jules was too important to himself, too much alone. (The irony here is that Jules is setting the scene. He is saying that those who are important pay the price by being shot, and then he goes on to state that he is too important to himself, too much alone. Later on in the novel he qualifies that statement by saying he "was too much alone without Nadine".) As a child he had sensed that in the movies a sudden noisy death would take place whenever a man was alone for two or three minutes; he unwisely left his companions, he whistled to himself as he opened a safe or changed his shirt, alone, and in a minute the camera would shift slyly to show a gun barrel... (This man that Jules is thinking about could signify Jules himself. Jules, unwisely, came to this apartment building by himself, telling no one where he was going, who he would be with, and how long he would be gone. He let's himself be alone with this lethal, crazy gal for too long, enough for us to get a glimpse of that gun barrel...)

This building impressed him. In the air, as if stirred by his presence, there was a sudden odor of dust; it was an odor he thought strange and elegant. (The dust symbolizes Jule's long standing relationship with Nadine. The dust is "stirred" by this new time in their relationship, after a long period of separation between the two. Oates description of the dust in the next sentence also shows what kind of relationship Jules and Nadine have. Almost every thought and emotion is clear to the other.) He had smelled dirt often enough but never this kind of clean, acrid, clear, invisible dust. He was accustomed to fast-moving, silent elevators, he was accustomed to escalators, to the functioning of efficient machines. The very slowness of this elevator charmed him. (The compare and contrast between the different types of elevators is used to enhance Jule's attitude towards girls besides Nadine. The fast-moving elevators is everybody else in the world and the slow ones are the novelties, the ones you don't see everyday. Nadine is not one of the "efficient machines", if you catch my drift. She DID try and kill bith herself and the man she loved."
pg. 397