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Harry
Joy Helpern is an old classmate of Nathan Zuckerman’s whom he reunites with at their 45th high school reunion. When they were teens, Nathan took Joy on a hayride and was disappointed when she wasn’t interested in getting physically intimate with him. At the reunion, she tearfully admits that she turned Nathan down back then because she was ashamed of her family’s extreme poverty and feared that if Nathan became her boyfriend, he would eventually escort her home and see how the family lived. Joy’s tearful admission affects Nathan deeply and builds on his growing anxieties about all the ways people misjudge and misunderstood one another.
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Joy Helpern Character Timeline in American Pastoral
The timeline below shows where the character Joy Helpern appears in American Pastoral. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 3
...asks Nathan to guess who she “was,” then she gives in and reveals her name: Joy Helpern. Nathan, she remembers, took her on a class hayride back in high school. Nathan...
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Joy and Nathan continue to reminisce about old times, then things get more serious. Joy admits...
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Nathan thinks about Joy and how her brother slept in the kitchen. He thinks about another classmate, Schrimmer, who...
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As Nathan dances with Joy to the dated music of their youth, he begins to flesh out the pieces of...
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