Death and Reality in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" by Joyce Carol Oates
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.
Connie is only concerned about her physical appearance. She can be described as being narcissistic because "she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirror or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right" (Oates 148). Connie wants her life to be different from everyone else's in her family. She thinks because she is prettier, she is entitled to much more. She wants to live the "perfect life" in which she finds the right boy, marries him, and lives happily ever after. This expectation is nothing less than impossible because she has not experienced love or anything like it. She has only been subjected to a fantasy world where everything is seemingly perfect. This is illustrated in the story when Connie is thinking about her previous encounters with boys: "Connie sat with her eyes closed in the sun, dreaming and dazed with the warmth about her as if this were a kind of love, the caresses of love, and her mind slipped over onto thoughts of the boy she had been with the night before and how nice he had been, how gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs" (151).
Being sexualized by the boys around her, Connie is self-conscious and finds her worth in beauty. The story even states, “She knew she was pretty and that was everything” (Oates 422). She is concerned about her appearance and what others think of her because she has been taught that she lacks any value outside of physical beauty norms. Arnold Friend, even tells Connie, “...be sweet like you can because what else is there for a girl like you but to be sweet and pretty and give in?” (Oates 432). Between this coaxing and the consistent message about the importance of beauty, Connie is nearly forced to conform to this mentality, which displays the lack of respect for young females as human beings. This in turn leads women to self-degradation as they are consistently viewed as sexual
In the beginning of the story we meet Connie, a fifteen year old girl living with her parents and older sister. Right away we see that Connie has a habit of checking her looks in mirrors and watching other people to see if they notice her and her good looks. “she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right.” (Oates) From this sentence we can see that Connie spends a lot of time thinking about her own appearance. It soon becomes apparent that she does this with the appearances of others as well, first shown when her mother is described. “Her mother [...] hadn't much reason any ...
Of her hundreds of short stories, Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” continues to be widely discussed among literary critics. In his article “Oates’s Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, David Gratz claims that Oates’s story can be read as a parable for a young girl’s fear of adulthood. He agrees there is much textual evidence that Connie dreams of her disturbing experience with Arnold Friend and that he is a “psychological projection” (Gratz 55) of her subconscious fears. Gratz notes how critics Joan Winslow and Larry Rubin point out that Connie appears to fall asleep before Arnold Friend arrives to her home and that her inability to control the situation toward the end is of a nightmarish quality (55). There is further evidence which supports the idea that Connie is in fact dreaming this scenario. Gratz notes that though the ending represents the “death of a part of her” (55), it is not only the destruction brought on by her sex drive she fears. Rather, it is her fear of the inevitability of growing older and having to endure hard changes that come with it that projects itself onto Connie’s daymare.
Connie in my mind wants to be a woman in many ways, putting on the disguise of a woman’s look, hiding that she is really just a kid. Only caring how pretty she is, and if the boys will be looking at her. She hangs out with her friends a couple days
Growing up in the 1960’s was very different then the way we grow in in society today. Life was very different regarding food, family structure, television, values, and morals. Many think life may have been more simple then. The 60’s was a very historic time in history for many reasons. Many young adults are eager to learn about what life was like then. It was a time of social revolution after all.
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.
In the free verse poem "When death comes" by Mary Oliver, the speaker contemplates what the inevitability of what death means to humans. Structurally, the poem bears no rhyme scheme as it depicts the free thought of the speaker. The voice of the speaker in this poem resonates with curiosity and the idea of life after death. Through the utilization of rhetorical devices such as repetition, alliteration, symbolism, and personification, the reader will come to understand that underlying tone that death is imminent regardless of how one 's life is spent. Within the poem, the source of tension resides in the constant internal struggle to oust the cycle of life and death. In some instances, Oliver’s curiosity and acceptance of death allows her to
Oates, Joyce Carol. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Backpack Literature. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Pearson Education, 2010. Print.
“I don't want to survive. I want to live.” This fairly popular quote can also serve as a summary of Gabriel Conroy’s character in James Joyce’s short story “The Dead." As we read, we see the toll that monotony has taken on Gabriel and, by the end, he sees it as well. This realization is coupled with another, much darker, realization: the inevitability of death. We see signs of these ideas sprinkled throughout the story, from the predictability of the guests to Gabriel’s constant anxiety when talking to the other guests and his long for an escape. These occurrences come to a head when, upon reaching their hotel, Gabriel’s wife Gretta tells him of the boy who didn’t want to live without her, and who died to see her. This story leaves Gabriel with a sudden understanding of love, life, and death, that changes his way of thinking about everyone, including himself.
In Joyce Carol Oates "where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" the reader is left with a chilling feeling as they read it 's haunting content. In this short story, the theme of fantasy vs. reality is explored through the protagonist Connie 's journey of self-realization as she leaves behind her naive self. Though the story follows Connie closely the third person omniscient point of view allows for developed story as Oates writes a warning to young girls everywhere.
In the film "What's Eating Gilbert Grape?" directed by Lasse Hallstrom in 1993, one of the main ideas is that of struggle and hardship. This idea is significant to the film because it relates to each character in a different way, making the storyline more interesting. Three different techniques used by Lasse Hallstrom to illustrate the idea of struggle and hardship include Gilberts voice over, the extra close-ups of Bonnie as she climbs the stairs and the double up of dialogue, where Mrs Carver is talking to Gilbert, and Mr Carver is heard tying to entertain their children in background.
The article “Ego-Evil and The Tale- Tell Heart” by Magdalen Wing-chi Ki; argues the symbolism of the eye to represent selfishness and greed in “The Tale-Tell Heart.” Wing- chi Ki discusses that Ego- Evil is different from Superego-Evil. The Ego-Evil focuses more on oneself. Therefore, the Ego-Evil is more focused on self-love; while the Super-Ego “welcomes evil due to some "fanatical devotion" or an "ideological ideal" (Wing-chi Ki, Magdalen). The “fanatical devotion” shows the way that the narrator felt when he got rid of the body. The narrator is fascinated with thinking that he will get away with hiding the body of the man with the evil eye. The “ideological ideal” emphasizes on the narrator’s obsession with the man’s evil eye. This gives the narrator the idea of murdering the old man, but only because he feels so uneasy in the presence of the evil eye. Wing-chi Ki argues that Edgar Allan Poe gives the narrator so little knowledge of the old man. Therefore, this entices the narrator into viewing the old man based on his fondness for the man, and not the truth on why the evil eye is present. The narrator; therefore, judges the old man only on how he feels towards the eye itself, and not the old man.
Through the first person narrator, Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart" illustrates how man's imagination is capable of being so vivid that it profoundly affects people's lives. The manifestation of the narrator's imagination unconsciously plants seeds in his mind, and those seeds grow into an unmanageable situation for which there is no room for reason and which culminates in murder. The narrator takes care of an old man with whom the relationship is unclear, although the narrator's comment of "For his gold I had no desire" (Poe 34) lends itself to the fact that the old man may be a family member whose death would monetarily benefit the narrator. Moreover, the narrator also intimates a caring relationship when he says, "I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult" (34). The narrator's obsession with the old man's eye culminates in his own undoing as he is engulfed with internal conflict and his own transformation from confidence to guilt.
The Reality of Death Dealing with the death of a loved one is one of life's most challenging obstacles. The pain and suffering that a person goes through cannot be fully understood unless experienced firsthand, like people that have experienced death through abortion. However, for some who have experienced death in war, death is something more like a game, where it is feared, yet made fun of in hopes of lessening the truth of reality. In the short story, “The Things They Carried”, by Tim O’Brian, the author demonstrates his attempts to make death less real through tactics like telling stories about the dead as if they were living, joking about zombies and conceiving the dead as items instead of people.
On the surface, the physical setting of The Tell Tale Heart is typical of the period and exceedingly typical of Poe. The narrator and the old man live in an old, dark house: '(for the shutters were close fastened, through fear of robbers)'; (Poe 778). Most of the story takes place at night: 'And this I did for seven long nights-every night just at midnight?'; (778). The physical aspect is not the most important component of setting for this analysis. More important are the mental and emotional settings. This clearly explains the personality of the narrator. One can assume the narrator is insane. He freely admits to his listener that he is '?-nervous-very, very dreadfully nervous?'; (777). But he then asks, '?but why will you say that I am mad?'; (777). He also admits that, 'The disease had sharpened my senses?'; (777). If not insanity, what disease does he speak of? The reason for his actions was one of the old man's eyes: '?-a pale blue eye, with a film over it'; (777). This is easily recognizable to the reader as an eye with cataract on it. This is nothin...