Where Are You Going Where Have You Been Literary Analysis

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Joyce Carol Oates’ short story Where are You Going Where Have You Been explores a teenage girl’s path of rebellion and loss of innocence. Through Connie's willingness to relinquish herself to others, Oates demonstrates that insecurity and fear can diminish one's dignity. 15 year-old Connie struggles to discover herself whilst living in her sister’s shadow, leading her to rebel for attention. The lack of intimacy from her parents in combination with constant comparison to her sister degrades Connie, leaving her insecure and vulnerable. Her risky behavior in pursuit of attention ultimately leads her to attract unwanted attention from a dangerous man named Arnold Friend. Connie reveals that throughout her life she has been constantly subjected …show more content…

June’s constant praisal is at the expense of Connie. As June’s self esteem is boosted from her family’s attention and admiration, Connie becomes increasingly insecure because of her inability to attain the same level of success as her sister. She seeks the same attention as her sister, yet has been conditioned to believe that she cannot match her sister’s accomplishments, leading Connie to rebel for attention. She feels as though her self worth rests solely on the opinions of others, because her relationship with her family has not provided her with any reassurance of her value. Consequently, Connie struggles with insecurities, as she always feels a need to meet the expectations of others. Arnold states, “‘What else is there for a girl like you but to be sweet and pretty and give in?’” Arnold Friend intends to objectify Connie, in an attempt to place her worth on her appearance. He suggests that as a girl, her only purpose in life is to live up to expectations of being “sweet” and

Where Are You Going Where Have You Been Loss Of Innocence Essay
470 Words | 1 Pages
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
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Carol Oats' Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
1108 Words | 3 Pages
Connie's character plays a big role in what ultimately happens to her. Connie is a vain girl that thinks the way you look is everything. She plays the stereotypical part for girls in today's society. She thinks that as long as you are pretty and dress a certain way then you are everything. This comes across when Oates writes "Connie thought that her mother preferred her to June because she was prettier" (980). By flaunting her looks she could easily give a guy like Arnold Friend perverted ideas about her. It could make them see her as easy, which he did.
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Death and Reality in Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates
1268 Words | 3 Pages
Joyce Carol Oates' "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" is about a young girl's struggle to escape reality while defying authority and portraying herself as a beauty queen; ultimately, she is forced back to reality when confronted by a man who symbolizes her demise. The young girl, Connie, is hell- bent on not becoming like her mother or sister. She feels she is above them because she is prettier. She wants to live in a "dream world" where she listens to music all day and lives with Prince Charming. She does not encounter Prince Charming but is visited by someone, Arnold Friend, who embodies the soul of something evil. Arnold Friend symbolizes "Death" in that he is going to take Connie away from the world she once knew. Even if she is not dead, she will never be the same person again, and will be dead in spirit. With the incorporation of irony, Oates illustrates how Connie's self-infatuation, her sole reason for living, is the reason she is faced with such a terrible situation possibly ending her life.
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Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates
1146 Words | 3 Pages
Arnold Friend’s layers of deception. Connie’s blindness is the pretext of her loss of innocence
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Where Are You Going Where Have You Been Essay
1070 Words | 3 Pages
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,"
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Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
1099 Words | 3 Pages
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”. Backpack Literature. An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Ed. X.J. Kennedy & Dana Gioia. 4th ed. New Jersey: Pearson, 2006. (323-336). Print.
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Where Are You Going?
704 Words | 2 Pages
Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” tells the tale of a fifteen year old girl named Connie living in the early 1960’s who is stalked and ultimately abducted by a man who calls himself Arnold Friend. The short story is based on a true event, but has been analyzed by many literary scholars and allegedly possesses numerous underlying themes. Two of the most popular interpretations of the story are that the entire scenario is only dreamt by Connie (Rubin, 58) and that the abductor is really the devil in disguise (Easterly, 537). But the truth is that sometimes people really can just be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Connie, a victim of terrifying circumstance will be forever changed by her interactions with Friend.
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Allusions In Joyce Carol Oates 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been'
1005 Words | 3 Pages
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.
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Review Of Joyce Carol Oates 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'
929 Words | 2 Pages
"Where are you going, where have you been?" written by an American writer, "Joyce Carol Oates". The story is written in the third person limited omniscient point of view, the tone switches from the ignorance to hopelessness in the end. The main character of the story is Connie, a self-centred, fifteen years old beautiful girl: Like every typical teenager, she is rebellious and totally into herself, who daydream about boys and romance. Throughout the story, Oates discloses many major factors of worry; Such as the lack of conversation between a child and a parent, Our safety, the eagerness of growing up, and how we tend to trust anyone with same preferences as ours. In life, many times we take our family, our lifestyle, and other very important things for granted without considering about the value of them and the twist which life will bring; Similarly, Connie was also clueless about her destiny.
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Comparison Of 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'
981 Words | 2 Pages
“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
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Where Are You Going Where Have You Been Character Analysis Essay
453 Words | 1 Pages
In the short story by Joyce Carol Oates, “Where are you going, where have you been?” it is about a young girl, Connie, that decides to stay home one day rather than joining her family to a barbeque at their aunts house. She has the entire house alone to herself until two guys, Arnold and his friend, arrive. Arnold tries to manipulate Connie into going with him for a ride in his car. Connie is tempted and confused until she realizes that Arnold is much older than him and she begins to panic.
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Little Red Riding Hood by Bill Delaney
937 Words | 2 Pages
Her father works out of town and does not seem to be involved in his daughters lives as much. Her older sister, who works at the school, is nothing but plain Jane. Connie’s mother, who did nothing nag at her, to Connie, her mother’s words were nothing but jealousy from the beauty she had once had. The only thing Connie seems to enjoy is going out with her best friend to the mall, at times even sneaking into a drive-in restaurant across the road. Connie has two sides to herself, a version her family sees and a version everyone else sees.
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Connie´s Coming of Age
1245 Words | 3 Pages
Oates, Joyce Carol. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Backpack Literature. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2010. Print.
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Where Are You Going?
1048 Words | 3 Pages
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
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Reader Response Essay - Joyce Carol Oates's Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
755 Words | 2 Pages
However, as I continued to read the story I began to wonder if maybe Connie’s life was not in any way parallel to my own. I have a younger sister where she has an older sister, but that is where the similarities end. Her mother is always telling her that she should be more like June, her older sister. It seemed to me that June living with her parents at her age was unusual, but the fact that she seemed to enjoy this and was always doing things to h...
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Where Are You Going Where Have You Been Literary Analysis

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