It's like a Common Graveyard: Photographs of Unknown Men, Women, and Children...Black Faces Beside White

This text presents an attempt to explain the impact of a literary text in the context of the neurobiological theory of PP. According to this concept, the brain's main function is to survive in an unstable and ambiguous environment. Survival is made possible by the confrontation between top-down predictions (generative model) generated by the brain about the causes of its afferents and prediction error signals triggered by bottom-up postsynaptic signals in cortical hierarchies, which are the result of perception of the external world. Cognition of aesthetic artefacts - especially literary ones, which are the subject of the research in this article - is particularly difficult due to the complexity and polysemous nature of artworks, which exacerbates the increased uncertainty of the viewer interpreting such artefacts. In this article, PP has been used to analyse diagnoses of the causes of social conflict in the United States as depicted in three Joyce Carol Oates novels. The argument presented is intended to lead to the conclusion that PP makes it possible to highlight the connections between the elements of the narrative trajectories in the three novels of the American author. These elements make up sequences, expressing the problem of ideological or intellectual “images” in which the protagonists seek confirmation of their identity. The unveiling of the danger posed by such a course of action is achieved through the use of an experimental narrative form, in which motifs alluding to the images develop and the dangers associated with them combine to form a web of meaning, although their recognition is not as obvious and aggressive as following the events of the plot.