In the short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Joyce Carol Oates, the author, depicts the suspenseful story of a young girl who is abducted and later murdered. The story starts out innocently enough, the young girl, Connie, is sneaking off with her to friend to go hang out with boys just like any teenager might do. It is not until the next day, when Connie stays at home that the nightmare she is about to experience begins. Oates reveals the character of antagonist Arnold Friend, through her use of dialogue, physical description, and contrast between fantasy and reality. Music is a very prevalent theme in this short story. Throughout the entire story, there is a sense of surrealism. Connie often is not quite sure if what is …show more content…
Music acts as a bridge between the physical world, where she is constantly fighting with her parents and sister, to a fantasy world where she is in control of whatever happens. Oates takes this even further though portraying the incident with Arnold Friend as neither quite reality nor fantasy. Oates fills Connie’s head with ideas taken from the songs on the radio about love and boys and in general just being a teenager. When she finds herself in a situation with Arnold, her knowledge about attraction fails her. No longer is it the romantic words that are in her favorite song but instead a creepy old man looking at her like prey. **analyze song lyrics??** Arnold demonstrates a sort of omniscient presence in the story by knowing every little detail of Connie’s life, including what her family was wearing that day when they were at the barbeque. He seemed to know about all of her family members, not just her mother, father, and sister. He also asked about one of her neighbors. Knowing all this stuff makes …show more content…
Whether it is his car, a bright color, almost painful to look at, with outdated phrases and words painted on the side (like someone who is just one step behind pop culture) or the fact that he cannot walk straight in his boots alarms her. His friend, Ellie, looks like “a baby faced forty year old”, another alarming fact. Everything about Arnold and his friend’s physical appearance is slightly off-putting. There is something subtly strange about him. His car is a great example of this. It is a bright color that “was almost painful to the eyes” and had the name Arnold Friend painted on the side. Connie thought it was a bit odd to have a name written on the side of a car, as long as a phrase that had already gone out of style. Arnold was drunk during their altercation, as he could not seem to hold himself up and walk straight. Besides this, he also lined his boots with tin cans and paper to make himself appear taller. He had a wig-like hairdo and a face that looked like it was plastered on with makeup. Everything about Arnold Friend was fake and Connie realized this, just not in
A theme that runs through this story is that music seems to be the bridge from the real world into Connie's fantasy world. She doesn't know what she wants, but it's got something to do with "the music that made everything so good." When Arnold Friend drove up the driveway, Connie was listening to music, "bathed in a glow of slow-pulsed joy." She soon discovered that he was playing the same music in his car. This is not a coincidence; I think it makes a connection in the back of Connie's mind. And, the story says that it seemed to Connie like Arnold "had come from nowhere," and "belonged nowhere," and that everything about him "was only half real."
"Connie, don't fool around with me. I mean—I mean, don't fool around," he said, shaking his head. He laughed incredulously. He placed his sunglasses on top of his head, carefully, as if he were indeed wearing a wig…” (Oates 6). Joyce Carol Oates’ short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” highlights an altercation, meeting, conflict and dispute between a teenage girl, named Connie, and a psychotic rapist named Arnold Friend. Throughout their altercation, Arnold Friend tempts and encourages Connie to get in the car with him and lead her to a variety of possible dangerous situations, one of which includes her getting raped . There is no doubt that Joyce Carol Oates’ uses Arnold Friend in her short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” to symbolize the Devil and embody all of the evil and sinister forces that are present in our world. This becomes apparent when the reader focuses on how deranged Arnold Friend is and begins to
Arnold Friend, one of the two main characters in the short story “Where Are You Going Where Have You Been” written by Joyce Carol Oates, is looked upon as a controversial character. Friend has many distinct character traits, but it is often argued whether those traits are good or bad. Some view Friend as a savior figure, while others see him as a satanic representation. Throughout the story, Oates uses many symbols to convey Friend’s character. Arnold Friend is portrayed as a savior through the symbolic usage of music, cars, and clothing.
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
Arnold Friend’s layers of deception. Connie’s blindness is the pretext of her loss of innocence
Ignorance and vanity can be good, in small amounts, but too much can lead to very unwelcome consequences. Connie, a teenage girl who can’t get enough of herself, learned this the hard way when a strange man by the name of Arnold Friend arrives at her house with the intent of taking her on a ‘date’. Instead of calling the police or locking herself in, like common sense would imagine, Connie uneasily greets Arnold from her door when he gets out of his car, instantly letting her vanity and ignorance get the best of her. Joyce Carol Oates shocks the reader with the twist ending in her short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” in which after hearing Arnold’s threat towards her family, Connie hands herself over to Arnold allowing him
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’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.
Connie had two sides to her character. To begin with, Connie possesses distinctive personas relying upon the setting she ends up in; at home she is one individual, with her companions she is another. Moreover Arnold Friend's personality is conflicted. He introduces himself as an adolescent kid, yet over the span of the story it turns out to be evident that his outward character is a façade concealing something substantially more evil and the other is he can be viewed as the fiend incarnate. Then again Arnold can be interpreted as only an invention of Connie's creative
Oates uses a great number of symbols in her short story "Where are you going? Where have you been? to create an aura of unease and Devilishness. Her principal symbols are Arnold Friend, his disguise, and the music Connie listens to. Oates' use of symbolism and Biblical allusions to Satan force the reader to raise an eyebrow to the character of Arnold Friend and the doomed future of Connie.
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 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.
There are many notorious characters in literature, all with their own menacing qualities and depraved actions. None, however, have struck such a devastatingly creepy chord as Arnold Friend of Joyce Carol Oates "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" Seducer of young girls and embodiment of Lucifer, Arnold Friend is anything but a friend. Arnold Friend is presented through both actions and appearances, and these combine to diminish his likeability, while adding to his devilish persona. Although Arnold Friend's traits are never stated outright, they are presented through his speech and interaction with other characters, which ultimately creates a more impacting effect and lasting impression.
By doing that, it also gave Arnold Friend a hint that she was easy to manipulate. Then, concerning the dialogue element, the explanation for both the movie and the short-story will be the same since I use the passage between Arnold Friend and Connie at her house. Since Connie is responding so naively at the very beginning of their conversation, it is almost certain that Arnold would succeed to manipulate her. In fact, the biggest mistake she made was to actually get out of the house and start the conversation with him: "She went into the kitchen and approached the door slowly, then hung out the screen door, her bare toes curling down off the step" (314). Through this action, it already gave Arnold Friend the idea that she is innocent and vulnerable; the only thing left was to seduce her with his words. Finally, I believe the movie would better suits the theme because we can visually observe how innocent she is with her mimics, her behaviour, her clothing. Although Oates’ short-story is very descriptive, the message behind this story doesn’t have the same effect on us than the
In the short story “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?”, by Joyce Carol Oates, the use of the symbolism of Connie’s clothes, her fascination with her beauty, Arnold Friend’s car and Arnold Friend himself help to understand the story’s theme of evil and manipulation. The story, peppered with underlying tones of evil, finds Oates writing about 15-year-old Connie, the protagonist of the story, a pretty girl who is a little too into her own attractiveness, which eventually gets her into trouble with a man named Arnold Friend. The story is liberally doused with symbolism, from the way Connie dresses to the shoes on Arnold Friend’s feet. In “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?” the reader can pick up on some of the symbols very easily, while others need deeper thought. The subtle hints of symbolism throughout the story create a riveting tale that draws the reader in. Connie finally succumbs to Arnold Friend at the end of the story, it then becomes obvious that he represents the devil and the symbolism of her clothing and Arnold’s car all tie together to create a better understanding of the story.