Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart (1990) is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates. It is the story of two young people who are growing up in a small town, in upstate New York in the 1950’s. The novel takes its title from the poem, “In the desert,” by Stephen Crane, from his collection of poetry, entitled The Black Riders. In Crane’s poem, a naked, bestial creature is sitting in the desert. The creature is eating its own heart, and saying, “I like it / Because it is bitter, / And because it is my heart.”

The setting of the novel is Hammond, New York. As the novel begins, the body of a sixteen-year-old boy is discovered floating in the Cassadaga River. The boy’s name is Patrick (“Little Red”) Garlock. His skull has been smashed. He is the son of an unstable family that had moved to Hammond from West Virginia in the early 1940’s. His mother, Vesta, is mentally unbalanced. She has been abused and abandoned by her husband, Vernon. Vesta has nine children.

A crowd of onlookers watches the recovery of the body from the river. Standing in the crowd is thirteen-year-old Iris Courtney. She is shy and withdrawn. She is a student at the junior high school.

Iris is the daughter of Duke and Persia Courtney. Duke is a salesman at the Montgomery Ward department store. Duke is a compulsive gambler, who has fallen into debt due to his betting on horses at the racetrack. Persia has worked at a succession of jobs, as a waitress, and as a saleswoman at a store. She is an alcoholic, who has a stormy relationship with her husband, but is compulsively attracted to him.

The novel uses flashback technique to tell the story of the events leading up to the death of Little Red Garlock. The night of Little Red’s death, thirteen-year-old Iris walks to Cheney’s Variety Store, to buy a pack of cigarettes. The store is only a few blocks away from her home, and does not comply with the law forbidding the sale of cigarettes to minors. Iris has a secret admiration for Jinx Fairchild, a fifteen-year-old boy who works at the store. Jinx is a star basketball player at Hammond Central High.

Iris’s attraction to Jinx is a secret, because she is a shy, innocent thirteen-year-old, and because she is white, and he is black.

As she walks home through the dark streets, Iris is harassed by Little Red, and she runs back to Cheney’s, where Jinx is closing the store. Little Red is a malicious and deranged juvenile delinquent.

Jinx accompanies Iris on her way home, to protect her from Little Red. Little Red follows them, and yells obscenities at them, until Jinx gets into a fight with him. Jinx and Little Red wrestle each other to the ground, and after Little Red picks up a chunk of concrete and slams it into Jinx’s back, Jinx desperately grabs a rock and slams it into Little Red’s head. Little Red is killed, and Jinx drags the body down the deserted street, and dumps it into the Cassadaga River.

The next day, when the body is discovered floating in the river, Iris tells a policeman that Little Red had been in trouble with a motorcycle gang, and that the gang had been looking for Little Red. By giving misleading information to the police, Iris helps to protect Jinx, and the police never discover who killed Little Red.

Jinx tries to avoid his sense of guilt by devoting his energy to playing basketball. He becomes known as “Iceman,” because he never shows his feelings, when he is on the court. He uses his talent as a basketball player to escape his memories of Little Red Garlock. At the same time, his emotional self-control helps him to deal with the antagonism which he has to confront, due to racial prejudice in the town. Jinx feels safe when he is playing basketball.

Jinx, whose real name is Verlyn, has an older brother, known as Sugar Baby. Sugar Baby’s real name is Woodrow Fairchild, Jr. Sugar Baby dropped out of high school, and has become involved in a life of crime and drug-dealing.

Jinx’s mother, Minnie, is a strong-willed and hard-working woman, who is a housekeeper for a local physician. Jinx’s father, Woodrow Sr., is a retired janitor.

Duke and Persia Courtney become estranged, and finally get divorced. Iris continues to live with her mother.

Persia has an affair with a young black man, named Virgil Starling. Virgil is a jazz clarinetist, who works at a clothing store.

One night, Persia and Virgil are driving together in Virgil’s car. They are suddenly stopped by a state highway patrol car. Virgil is harassed and intimidated by the state troopers. Persia is terrified by the brutality of the state troopers, but later feels ashamed that Virgil has been humiliated. After this incident, Persia and Virgil decide to end their relationship.

One day, Iris and Jinx happen to meet on a street in Hammond, and Iris tells Jinx not to blame himself for Little Red Garlock’s death, that it was her fault.

Two years later, when Jinx is a senior and Iris is a sophomore at Hammond High School, they both realize that they feel closer to each other than to anyone else. But they rarely speak to each other, in the cafeteria, or on the school bus, because they feel the need to conceal their attraction toward each other. They conceal their feelings from themselves, and from others.

In a basketball game, in the state tournament, Jinx falls and breaks his ankle. His hopes for a college basketball scholarship are permanently damaged, because his injury is so severe that he will never play basketball again.

Iris later recognizes that Jinx’s injury is caused, in part, by his need to punish himself, because of his sense of guilt about Little Red’s death. Jinx’s injury is an act of expiation, or self-punishment. Jinx later drops out of school, and takes a job in a machine shop at an automobile radiator company.

Persia Courtney falls into a state of chronic alcoholism. Iris spends more time in the public library, in order to avoid coming home, and having to confront her drunken mother.

Two years later, Iris graduates from Hammond High, and wins a full-tuition scholarship to Syracuse University. Persia becomes ill, and finally dies of cirrhosis of the liver.

Jinx eventually gets married to a young black woman named Sissy Weaver, and has two children. Iris and Jinx continue to feel close to each other, though they are no longer seeing each other.

Jinx’s older brother, Sugar Baby, is a drug dealer, who has been working for a well-known gangster named Leo Lyman. Sugar Baby is murdered when Lyman suspects him of trying to steal drug money.

In 1962, during her junior year at Syracuse University, Iris takes a part-time job as a student-assistant to Professor Byron Savage. Iris admires Dr. Savage, and becomes a friend of his wife, Gwendolyn.

Iris reveals very little of herself, or of her past, to the Savages, but instead acts as a mirror for them, reflecting or magnifying their own happiness to them. In turn, she feels an attraction to the Savage family, because she feels the need to have a sense of belonging.

In the summer of 1963, Iris is invited by the Savage family to visit them at their summer home, and she meets their thirty-one-year-old son, Alan. He is a brilliant scholar, who has been traveling in Europe, studying art history. He falls in love with Iris, who is now twenty-one years old, and asks her to marry him. Iris is attracted to Alan, but she still has a secret passion for Jinx Fairchild.

On November 22, 1963, the university community is stunned by the news of President Kennedy’s assassination. That night, Iris walks recklessly into an area of the black ghetto in Syracuse, and is mugged by a gang of young black men. She is hospitalized for her injuries, and is released from the hospital a few days later.

Alan and Iris plan to be married in September 1964. Alan has accepted a position as assistant curator at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and Iris plans to enroll as a graduate student in art history at the University of Pennsylvania.

Iris returns to Hammond, New York, in May 1964, to visit her uncle, Leslie Courtney. Leslie is a photographer, who has never married, because he has always had a secret passion for Iris’s late mother, Persia.

Meanwhile. Jinx has enlisted in the army, and has been sent to Vietnam. Before he left for Vietnam, Jinx had sat for a photo at Leslie’s photography studio, and had asked Leslie to keep a copy of the wallet-sized photo in an envelope for Iris.

Iris opens the envelope, and looks at the photo. It shows Jinx in his army uniform, and on the back of the photo he has written, “Honey—Think I’ll “pass”?” Iris breaks into tears, and tells her uncle Leslie that she loved Jinx.

Later, back in Syracuse, as the novel ends, Iris is being fitted for her bridal gown, and she asks Mrs. Savage, “Do you think I’ll look the part?”

Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart is divided into three parts, and an epilogue. Part One, entitled “The Body,” begins with the scene of Little Red’s body floating in the Cassadaga River, and describes the events leading up to his death. Part Two, entitled “Torsion,” describes the impact of Little Red’s death on the relationship between Iris and Jinx, and ends with the death of Iris’s mother, Persia. Part Three, entitled “Ceremony,” begins with Iris’s life at Syracuse University, and ends with her being assaulted by a gang of hoodlums. In the Epilogue, Iris plans to marry Alan Savage, and makes a visit to Hammond, New York, in May 1964.

The novel tells a powerful and moving story. Both Iris and Jinx feel isolated and unfulfilled. They have a longing in their hearts for a sense of personal identity. They have a desire to fit in, to belong to a family or community. But they are denied this sense of belonging, and thus are made to feel unwanted and unaccepted by society.

Both Iris and Jinx are made to feel guilty, and to feel a need for self-punishment, because of Little Red’s death, and because they feel the need to conceal their feelings from themselves, and from others. Subconsciously, they both have a need for atonement. This is enacted when Jinx falls and breaks his ankle; and later, when Iris is assaulted in a dangerous area of the city.

Iris and Jinx are secretly connected by love and guilt. They have a lasting emotional attachment to each other, but this bond between them cannot be fulfilled. They find that this is what defines them, and that this unfulfilled love for each other causes a feeling in their hearts of being empty. They come to recognize that they have a need to belong to each other.