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Where have you been? where are you going
Where are you going, where have you been? analysis
Where are you going, where have you been? analysis
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“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” written by Joyce Carol Oates is an unsettling and incredibly formidable story of a young woman’s loss of innocence during a time of social change and turbulent times. The story’s protagonist is Connie, a self-absorbed, yet beautiful fifteen year old girl, who not only is at odds with her family but also the conservative values handed down by her family. She, unknowing to her parents, spends her evenings exploring her independence and individuality as well as by flirting and picking up boys at a local diner. One evening she catches the attention of a strange, creepy boy who drives a gold, dilapidated convertible. While alone at home one Sunday afternoon, this same creepy boy driving the gold convertible, along with a friend, pulls up in front of her house. She recognizes the boy from the diner and he introduces himself as Arnold Friend. Initially, the silver-tongued, charismatic stranger intrigues Connie. This intrigue quickly turns to fear as a sense of uneasiness overcomes her. As Arnold insists she go for a ride with him, Connie refuses. He becomes more insistent and sinister and ultimately threatens to harm her family if she does not come with him. The story ends as Connie gives in and agrees to go with him; her immediate fate uncertain.
First published in 1966, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” is a story inspired by a Life magazine article about Charles Schmid, a manipulative and gruesome serial killer in Tucson, Arizona, who preyed upon the innocence of young girls (Ramsland). In addition to the factual events that greatly influenced this short story, Oates was able to show the monumentally historical events that were shaping America when it was written. The story is set...
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...ome because the horrible historical event that inspired this story back in 1966 will persists within our society today.
Works Cited
Anderson, Walt. The Age of Protest. Pacific Palisades, CA: Goodyear Pub., 1969. Print.
"BBC NEWS | Programmes | Hardtalk | Joyce Carol Oates." BBC News - Home. Web. 06 Aug. 2011.
"Brief Analysis Of the Counterculture Movement of the 1960s." DocShare - A New Way to Share Documents Online. Web. 06 Aug. 2011.
"Founding of NOW." National Organization for Women (NOW). Web. 06 Aug. 2011.
Miller, Paula M. "Joyce Carol Oates." Identities & Issues in Literature (1997): 1. MagillOnLiterature Plus. EBSCO. Web. 6 Aug. 2011.
Ramsland, Katherine. "Charles Schmid, the Pied Piper of Tucson --The Crime Library — Inspiration for Joyce Carol Oates — Crime Library on TruTV.com." TruTV.com: Not Reality. Actuality. Web. 06 Aug. 2011.
Oates, Joyce C. "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been"" N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Apr. 2014.
In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by Joyce Carol Oates, Connie is a normal teenage girl who is approached outside her home by a guy named Arnold Friend who threatens to harm her, and she obeys, if she does not get in the car with him. Connie is the main character in this story who teaches us that sometimes we might search for adult independence too early before we are actually ready to be independent and on our own. Connie is so focused on her appearance that she works hard to create a mature and attractive adult persona that will get her attention from guys. This search for independence conflicts with Connie’s relationship with her family and their protection of her. Connie’s insecurity and low self-esteem is triggered by her fear of intimacy. Connie confuses having the attention of men with actually having them pursue her in a sexual way.
The Theme of Temptation in “Where Are You Going , Where Are you Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates
Joyce Carol Oates’s short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” clearly illustrates the loss of innocence adolescents experience as they seek maturity, represented by Connie's dangerous encounter with Arnold Friend. Connie symbolizes the many teens that seek independence from their family in pursuit of maturity. Connie’s great desire to grow up is apparent from the beginning of the story, as she experiments with her sexuality. However, it is clear that Connie is not interested in pursuing a relationship, but relishes the maturity she feels after being with the opposite sex. After following a boy to his car, she was “gleaming with a joy that had nothing to do with Eddie or even this place” (2). This suggests that Connie's exploits
Death and Reality in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" by Joyce Carol Oates
She immediately trusts him because they simply like the same radio station. The young girl has proven throughout the story that she is curious about sex. The reader also learns that she loves attention and Connie initially finds the attention that she is receiving by Friend to be rather flattering and the fact that she thinks he’s an older boy intrigues even more. Her fate though, seems to fit the extremist world in which she inhabits. A habitat where women are viewed by men as objects of beauty for their consumption. Connie later realizes that something is odd about Arnold. She notices that the slogans on his car are outdated. She notices his painted face, his wig, and his boots. Susan Nyikos was another writer that wrote an analysis on Where are you going, where have you been. She suggested that the reason Connie realized this was because he was only a figment of her imagination and that she had never awaken from her nap. Nyikos also noted that another critic stated that Arnold Friend was the devil and that’s what explained the hooves hidden by the boots. What Susan mainly argued was that “Like many of Oates's stories, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is based on real events—the story of a "tabloid psychopath known as 'The Pied Piper of Tucson'" whose specialty was the seduction and occasional murder of teen-aged girls,"
Joyce Carol Oates' short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" written in the late sixties, reveals several explanations of its plot. The story revolves around a young girl being seduced, kidnapped, raped and then killed. The story is purposely vague and that may lead to different interpretations. Teenage sex is one way to look at it while drug use or the eerie thought that something supernatural may be happening may be another. The story combines elements of what everyone may have experienced as an adolescent mixed with the unexpected dangers of vanity, drugs, music and trust at an early age. Ultimately, it is up to the reader to choose what the real meaning of this story is. At one point or another one has encountered, either through personal experience or through observation, a teenager who believes that the world is plotting against them. The angst of older siblings, peer pressure set upon them by their friends, the need for individualism, and the false pretense that at fifteen years of age, they are grown are all factors which affect the main character in this story.
Joyce Carol Oates was born on June 16th, 1938, in Lockport, New York. Raised on her parent’s farm in a rural area that had been hit by the Great Depression, she attended the same one-room school house as her mother. As a young child, Oates developed a love of literature and writing well beyond her years. She was very encouraged by her parents and grandparents to pursue her love of writing and as a teenager she was given her first typewriter. This was when her passion finally came to life. In 1953 at the age of only 15, she wrote her first novel about the rehabilitation of a drug dealer, which was later turned down by the publisher because the topic was not suitable for a young audience. Although her novels do focus on the horrors of society, her childhood growing up was no reflection of that. Oates has admitted that her childhood was “dull, ordinary and nothing people would be interested in. Oates continued writing throughout high school and earned a scholarship to attend Syracuse University. There she graduated at the top of her class in 1960, and in...
The overuse of biblical allusions throughout the story helps to expose the naive nature of Connie that reveals her as a victim of evil which shows that lust often transgresses on an individual’s identity. In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” Joyce Carol Oates expressed the subjective ideas by symbolizing Arnold Friend as a devil that tempts a clueless teenage girl Connie, who wanted to experience love.
Although the sixties were a decade in which the United States became a more open, more tolerant, and a freer country, in some ways it became less of these things. During the sixties, America intervened in other nations and efforts were made to stop the progress of the civil rights movement. Because of America’s foreign policy and Americans fight against the civil rights movement, it is clear that the sixties in America were not purely a decade of openness, tolerance, and freedom in the United States.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Celestial Timepiece. July 2007. U of San Francisco. 15 Mar. 2008.
Robinson, Sally "Heat and Cold: Recent Fiction by Joyce Carol Oates," Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXXI, 1992.
Oates, Joyce Carol. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Backpack Literature. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2010. Print.
Gale Kozikowski, Stan. " The Wishes and Dreams Our Hearts Make in Oates's 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'. " Journal of the Short Story in English. 33 (Autumn 1999): 89-103.
Joyce Carol Oates could be described as a “social novelist” but of a peculiar kind. She is not concerned with demonstrating the power of relationships, but rather the struggle of people expressing their fate with relationships to society. Oates also wants to express her concern with people in a way that they express themselves and the conscious they are ‘living’ in. She is also more than most woman writers, she is expressively open to the social turmoil, and the chaos of American life. Oates states how the human mind is simply a “wonderland”, and the significance of that to the social conflicts that is America today simply collide but do not connect (Wagner-Martin, 117). She was born in 1938 in Lockport New York and has published over 40 novels and creating countless short stories, as well as plays and poetry. She had a passion for writing since she was young, but