Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? By Joyce Carol Oates and Greasy Lake by T.C. Boyle are short stories that bring demise to the characters, but death surrounds them in different ways. The characters compare by the actions they take with their big egos, which get them into trouble in many ways. In Greasy Lake, the boys try to act as bad characters and pretend to be someone they are not. In Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? , Connie, the main character, possesses a certain attraction to the wrong group of people. In the short story Greasy Lake, the teenage boys, Jeff, Digby, and the Narrator (who is not named) go into town acting as “bad characters”. They drive their parents station wagon and “they wore torn up leather jackets, …show more content…
They flash their lights at the “greasy man”, not knowing he just dumped a body into the lake. The teenage boys “bad character” is in jeopardy when they think that they are tough until they actually get into a fight with the real “bad character’, the greasy character. Boyle shows that no matter how tough someone might think they are, there will always be someone else who is tougher and stronger. The narrator faces these facts from the beginning of the story to the end, from fighting an actual “bad character”, to attempting rape, and seeing the dead body float in the river. Their whole “bad character” shows change as the main idea of the story, when the narrator quotes, “ I wanted to get out of the car and retch, I wanted to go home to my parents’ house and crawl into bed”(310). The characters proved that they were not so tough after …show more content…
That all changed her mind when “Arnold Friend”, her creepy stalker, finds her and harasses her in front of her home. At first she did not know what to expect from the man and she did not know what his intentions were, he was creepy and seemed to be. Soon she realized that death was coming her way as Arnold Friend gave her no choice but to go in the car with her and her good looks would not be able to save her out of this situation. She began to slowly regret of all the fights with her mother, and not spending enough time with her family. Connie eventually realized what was important in life and what should have mattered to her. Connie, who was once so selfish and conceited, was now wishing she would have gone to her family BBQ or just see her mother one more time. She had no choice but to go with Arnold Friend. Her life was in jeopardy and her kidnapping, rape. This shows that when your life comes to its end, Connie started to have a lot of regrets and realized what the important things in life were. Unfortunately Connie had these realizations when it was too late and her life came to an end. Differences in the stories are that the boys in Greasy Lake were the boys had bad intentions to almost committing rape while Connie was raped.
In the beginning of the story the narrator and his boys considered themselves to be bad boys because of what they did, what people thought they were, and what they wore. To them, it was cool to be dangerous and bad. The people who wasn’t, were irrelevant. The narrator and his boys “wore torn-up leather jackets, slouched around with toothpicks in our mouths, sniffed glue and ether and what somebody claimed was cocaine” (par.1). Also they “struck elaborate poses to show that we didn’t give a shit about anything” (par. 1). The narrator looked forward to the nightlife and the bad stereotypes along with that, including: drinking, drug use, sex, violence, etc…. even though the narrator was only 19 years of age. The three of them would go uptown to Greasy Lake regularly, to party a hang out with others. Until one night the narrator and his boys encountered a rude awakening at Greasy Lake.
First of all, Connie was not happy at home. The story says that her father "was away at work most of the time," and "didn't bother talking much to them," so Connie didn't have love from him and had to find male attention somewhere else. Connie found her happiness in escaping with her friend to the drive-in restaurant and daydreaming about boys. But the happiness she found in both of these things had nothing to do with actual events; it is based on a fantasy. When she was out at the drive-in with a boy, her face gleamed "with the joy that had nothing to do with Eddie or even this place; it might have been the music." When she daydreamed about boys, they all "fell back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face, but an idea, a feeling mixed up with the urgent pounding of the music..."
In 'Greasy Lake,' the dualism of the characters' nature is ever-present. They are self-proclaimed bad guys who 'cultivated decadence like a taste' (79). As the story progresses, however, it is revealed that just the opposite is true. While they are essentially caricatures of themselves, it is this dynamic that drives the story. Their tough exterior is just that, an exterior veneer that permeates their actions as 'dangerous characters.' The narrator is somewhat detached from the younger self of his story. It is an ironic detachment'a parody of his moral ignorance. He recalls the 'bad? antics of his youth: driving their 'parents' whining station wagons,' but doing so as bad as humanly possible, of course. He mocks both himself and his friends in his retrospection of their experience in Greasy Lake, the consummate locale of 'bad.' To the boys, the lake serves as a kind of haven for bad characters such as themselves. Truly, however, the lake is an extension of the dynamic between who the boys are and who they parade around as. It is here where the previous and false understanding about their world is shattered, and they are thrust into a moralistic reformation. Ultimately, the dichotomous nature of the protagonist is resolved by his visit to the lake, and perhaps, the lake itself.
“How could a kid so sweet be so nasty too?” (54). ‘Yummy The Last Days of a Southside Story’ by G.Neri shares the true story of an eleven-year-old boy named Robert “Yummy” Sandifer who fell victim to Chicago gangs due to the alleged shooting of Shavon Dean. Yummy, a child too young to understand, too young to not give in, and never had a stable adult to look up to, is a prime example of a victim at the wrong place at the wrong time.
Coraghessen Boyle and Where are you going, where have you been by Joyce Carol Oates both fulfill the expectations of the coming-of-age-genre when the authors take us through events that the protagonists experience—transforming them from youth to maturity. Greasy Lake by T. Coraghessen Boyle ends most positively because the male protagonist realizes he didn’t murder Bobbie, and he learns a life lesson; there are dangerous consequences for bad actions. Where are you going, where have you been by Joyce Carol Oates ends negatively because the female protagonist, Connie, is kidnapped by the antagonist, Arnold Friend. Connie’s fate was not “sealed” because she was female, but because as an individual she is a vulnerable, young and naïve. Her “fate” could have happened to anyone wather male or female, who is vulnerable and
There’s a mystery in the ending itself, which gives a sense of horror to the audience. The reader doesn’t know what is going to happen to Connie. Is she going to be raped? Or get killed? When Connie runs to the phone, the reader gets excited and feels that something good is going to happen to her and that her destiny is about to change to better. But the author misleads the audience and manipulates them to make the story more horrifying and exciting. As soon as Connie realizes the danger she’s in is pretty serious, the language of the story shifts from being realistic to supernatural. Connie’s hearts starts “pounding, living thing inside this body that wasn’t hers either”/ “She watched herself push the door slowly open as if she were back safe somewhere in the other doorway”. (Oates, 1974) This seems like more of a fiction and horror than real events. Arnold calls her “blue-eyed girl”, but her eyes are brown, which suggest that Connie isn’t the same anymore she has transferred into something completely different. The very last scene that we get from the story is Arnold surrounded by “vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him—so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it.” (Oates, 1974) This image can be interpreted as Connie’s defeat of sacrificing herself to save her family from Arnold’s threats of hurting
Oates leaves the final parts of the story up to the reader’s imagination to interpret what happened when Connie left her house with Arnold. In the text, Arnold was threating her and her family if she touched the phone (Oates 5). Chopra has a different ending by showing Connie slowly walking out of the house to leave with Arnold by making it look like it was her own decision (Dickinson 206). Dickinson adds that the screen door acts as a symbolic representation to a line between childhood innocence and the harsh reality of the world (Dickinson 206). I agree that the screen door is a spilt in the story. It represents how Connie acted innocent with her parents when she is inside her home, and the real Connie who snuck across the highway to act older than her actual age and meet guys. Then once inside the house again, she pretends she saw the movie and never went to the diner with her friends (Oates 1). The situations that Connie was in differed dramatically once she passed her house door. Especially when she left to go to the “movies” and when she would come back to being on bad terms with her mother (Oates 1). Then again when she left her house with Arnold (Oates 6).
Their choices in the beginning are vastly different from those at the end. The plot of Greasy Lake is centered around this change in mindset and the choices the characters made, making it clear that the message was centered around this coming of age experience that they had. The message of Greasy Lake is focused on the change in character of the three boys, when they realized what keeping up their “bad” behavior can cause. It shows the reader one experience that changed teenagers into adults, which many other people experience as well. Everyone has been to Greasy Lake at some point in their lives, where they question who they are and become more mature, and this story exemplifies that journey through its main
When Arnold and Connie’s eyes meet inadvertently, Connie sees “a boy with shaggy black hair, in a convertible jalopy painted gold” (Oates 371). To Connie, this was by pure chance and a pure stranger. To Arnold, Connie is his next victim. On the very next day, Arnold shows up at Connie’s house while her parents and sister are away at a family barbeque. Arnold entices her to go for a ride in his car by the use of appealing music and smooth conversation. However, taking an innocent girl for a ride in his car was the last of his intentions. Because of Connie’s lack of experience, curiosity, and inability to withstand peer pressure she succumbs to Arnold’s predatory hands. On that dreadful day, Connie lost her innocence and her
The teenagers look at Freddie thinking he really has some major problems and could use some medical help, psychological for sure. Walking away, they put distance between them not wanting any trouble. Again, Freddie reads the paper when a heavyset Black boy wearing a Dodgers cap approaches the bus stop and stands directly by Freddie. Studying the boy for a minute Freddie is impressed with his blue LA hat and jumps up in an enthusiastic state.
The teenagers look at Freddie thinking he really has some major problems and could use some medical help, psychological for sure. Walking away, they put a distance between them not wanting any trouble. Again, Freddie reads the paper when a heavyset Black boy wearing a Dodgers cap approaches the bus stop and stands directly by Freddie. Studying the boy for a minute, impressed with his blue LA hat Freddie jumps up in an enthusiastic state.
Tom appears on the sidewalk armed with his whitewashing equipment, extremely low in spirit. For what boy wouldn’t be downhearted and melancholy at having to work while the rest on of the world is free to frolic in the sunshine. Applying his genius, Tom puts his plan to turn this utterly hopeless situation into a hopeful one into action by playing on human nature. In the story there is a scenario including Tom and one of the local town boys, Ben:
She enjoys the rush of attracting boys and pays little attention to them as individuals, she is more interested in the feeling of validation and control that she gets from their meetings than the actual relationships themselves. Oates writes of Connie’s experiences” it was summer vacation-getting in her mother’s way and thinking, dreaming about the boys she met. But All the boys fell back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face but an idea, a feeling, mixed up with the urgent insistent pounding of the music and the humid night air of July.” Connie is a girl in control of her environment, until a chance meeting changes the course of her
Connie’s clothes and infatuation with her own beauty symbolize her lack of maturity or knowing her true self, which in the end enables her to be manipulated by Arnold Friend. Connie was enamored with her own beauty; in the beginning of the story Oates states that Connie “knew
I agree with your theory that Connie is the black sheep in her family and her family adores Connie’s sister, June. The author, Joyce Carol Oates, symbolized Connie as a vain average teenage girl who agured with her mother. Connie received less affection from her family which led to her probably feeling neglected. And the threats that Arnold made towards Connie were direct threats about Connie’s family, described what June looked like and the location of her family. Another theory for why Connie decided to go with Arnold is that she longed for acceptance in her family. Connie decision of going with Arnold was protective instinct because she wanted to do the right thing of protecting her family, even though she does not feel acceptance.