[5][6] Though Oates has laced the novel with “perennial best-seller ingredients,” her work is endowed with elements of “literary and philosophical allusions” that transcend the narrative featuring sex and violence.

[7][8] Biographer Joanne V. Creighton, however, detects an inadequacy in the development of Oates’s protagonists: “Perhaps the novel’s most blatant weakness is the failure of the two main characters, Shar and Karen, to come to life as credible creations.

Lacking reality, they do not engage the readers empathy and sympathy.”[7][9] With Shuddering Fall stands as a significant apprenticeship effort that anticipates the themes and structure of Oates's subsequent five novels.

[10] The ironically named “Eden” County serves both a symbolic and literal function in a novel that is “most centrally a study in the nature of innocence.”[3] At the center of the work is the irreconcilable differences between Karen and Shar, each of whom strives for self-identity.

Biographer Joanne V. Creighton writes: The two become involved in a life-and-death struggle for mastery and control, a battle that Karen wins because her nullity gives her greater strength than Shar’s passion.