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Recommended: comparison and contrast essay
Authors of great stories often use good technical writing skills. The purpose of this essay is to compare and contrast two short stories: Where Are you going, Where Have You Been by Joyce Carol Oates and Hills Like White Elephants by Earnest Hemingway. The comparison and contrast will be done based on their use of plot, point of view and character development.
The short story where are you going, where have you been is about a teenage girl who is, vain, self-doubting and affixed in the present. She does not know anything about the past or doubts it and has no plan of the future. She argues with her mother and she thinks she is jealous of her. The start of the plot is not very dramatic rather it is more like an introduction. We get a good description of the story’s Protagonist, Connie at the beginning of the story and through out. She is familiar, the typical American teenager, who dream, fantasize and have difficulty differentiating the real world from fairytale. Kozikowsky compares the story to the popular recent Disney tale “Cinderella” (1999). In “Where are you going, where have you been?” the setting of the story is not revealed at the beginning. The reader slowly learns about Connie’s family and her living condition throughout the story.
In “Hills Like Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway, there is no dramatic situation at the beginning of the story either, rather He starts by giving us a detailed description of the setting. The reader gets a clear mental image of where the story will take place. The Author begins the story by introducing the scene since it will have a great significance in understanding the many symbolisms he will be using later. Some experts say that “Although there is a situation, there is no plot” ( Henningf...
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Works cited
Henningfeld, Diane Andrews. "Hills Like White Elephants." Short Stories for
Students. Detroit: Gale, 2002. Literature Resource Center. 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. Rpt. in Short Story Criticism. Ed. Joseph Palmisano. Vol. 70. Detroit: Gale, 2004. 89-103. Literature Resource Center. Gale.
Renner, Stanley. "Moving to the girl's side of 'Hills Like White Elephants.'." The
Hemingway Review. 15.1 (Fall 1995): p27. Literature Resource Center. Gale.
Weeks, Lewis E., Jr. "Hemingway Hills: Symbolism in 'Hills like White
Elephants'." Studies in Short Fiction. 17.1 (Winter 1980): 75-77. Rpt. in Literature Resource Center. Detroit: Gale, 75-77. Literature Resource Center. Gale.
Written two centuries apart, “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne and “Where Are You Going; Where Have You Been” by Joyce Carol Oates are two seemingly different stories. However, if looked at closely, several elements can be tied together. Each story has a similar point of view, but the story is told from two different perspectives. Several themes are unique to the stories, but deep within similarities can be found. The authors conclude their stories in two different ways, but the endings are somewhat the same. These two stories contain elements that are obviously contrasting, yet comparable at the same time.
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is told from the point of view of a girl with “long dark blond hair that drew anyone’s eye to it” named Connie. Connie was a very pretty fifteen year old girl, which loved to go out with her friends and meet new people. Laura’s, the best friend of Connie, father “drove the girls the three miles to town and left them at a shopping plaza so they could walk through the stores or go to a movie”. It became a lifestyle for Connie which eventually became a problem being that she met a suspicious
...lis, Christina Marsden. "'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?': Seduction, Space, And A Fictional Mode." Studies In Short Fiction 18.1 (1981): 65. Literary Reference Center. Web. 24 Feb. 2014.
As teenagers, we feel like we know all the complexities of life, and that the changes we experience during puberty are the ultimate variabilities of our lives, but the irony of this is that they still have so much more to learn. The story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” was written by Joyce Carol Oates, an influential, feminist author in the 1960s. The story was inspired by the real-life serial killer, Charles Schmid, also known as the “Pied Piper of Tucson”, who like the antagonist in the story, Arnold Friend, preyed on young girls as his victims (Sharma 5). An important element that influenced the story is that it was written in the 1960's, a period known as the Second-Wave of feminism, this was a time when women across America began to break free from the patriarchal system and assert their rights as citizens outside of the home (The 1960s-70s American Feminist Movement: Breaking Down Barriers
The author begins her message with the title of her work, which conveys the idea of passages of time in life. The phrase "where are you going" suggests a time in the future, and the phrase "where have you been" evokes the past. Oates' message continues through the plot and characters. The basic elements of "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" are rooted in a true story of a 1965 crime. Occurring just a year before Oates' 1966 story was published, the "parallels between [th...
Oates, Joyce Carol. "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" Exploring Literature: Writing and Arguing about Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and the Essay. By Frank Madden. 5th ed. New York: Pearson Longman, 2012. 436-48. Print.
Hemingway, Ernest. "Hills like White Elephants." Responding to Literature. Ed. Judith Stanford. Boston: McGraw-Hill, 2006. 841-44. Print.
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.
Burroway, Janet. Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft. 6th ed. New York: Longman, 2003. As Rpt. in Rankin, Paul "Hemingway's `Hills Like White Elephants'." Explicator, 63 (4) (Summer 2005): 234-37.
A short story by Joyce Carol Oates called “Where are you going, where have you been?” reflects the writer’s point of view of the way society looked to women in the sixties. The story takes place in the 1960’s when almost everything reached a turning point at that time. It talks about a teenager who wanted boys’ attention, but she ended up leaving her family house with a stranger. Connie represented most teenage girls, and their destiny at that time. The story can be looked at from many different points of view such as feminist, social, psychological and historical (Purdue (OWL)). The time this story had taken place is what makes it important. The story was written when the feminist movement was established, and the American society traditions have turned 180 degrees.
The characters in short stories, ‘Where are you going, Where have you been?’ by Joyce Carol Oates and ‘The man who was almost a man’ by Richard Wright, have lot of similarities between them even though the stories themselves take place in different setting in different time periods, but using symbolism, context clues, and our own experiences we as students of literature can better understand both characters and get an insight into their inner workings beyond what the text tells us on the surface.
“Stop gawking at yourself. Who are you? You think you’re so pretty?” ‘Where are you going, where have you been?’ is a short story about a girl named Connie. Connie is a 15 year old girl who to her mother appears vain. Her mother was once pretty and over the years lost her looks so she attacked her daughter. Connie represents the girls of society which seem to be entering womanhood. In “Where are you going, Where have you been?” Joyce Carol Oath uses literary devices to develop both the theme and tone.
1.The short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” is a brilliant, masterful work that
The Eternal Present in Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, Michele D. Theriot, Journal of Short Story in English, 48, (Spring 2007): 59-70. Academic Search Complete. Web. 2 November 2013.
Hemingway, Ernest. “Hills Like White Elephants.” Literature Approaches to Fiction, Poetry, and Drama. Ed. DiYanni, Robert. 2nd ed. New York. Mc Grew Hill. 2008. 400-03. Print.