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Analysis essay where are you going, where have you been? by joyce carol oates
Joyce Carol Oates: "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been by Joyce Carol Oates analysis
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In 1965, a serial killer was being shown by the media to the citizens. The killer was a loafer who had great imagination. He always made up stories about him killing others and told the stories to his friends. He told so many stories that no one believed it when he really killed someone. His way of deception was to talk to girls and kill them when they were off their guard. Three innocent girls were killed by his hand and he was named “The Pied Piper of Tucson”. Wondering how could a weird guy like this successfully kill so many girls, Joyce Carol Oates wrote “Where are you going, Where Have You Been”.
“Where are you going, Where Have You Been” is one of the most popular story written by Joyce Carol Oates, one of the greatest author in America. The story is about a
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girl named Connie, being threatened and coerced by a stranger named Arnold Friend, eventually surrender and go out with the stranger. Although the storyline is simple, the depiction of the mental movement of people and the construction of the plot. The ending is even surprising— as Connie "moving out into the sunlight where Arnold Friend waited”, where should be the climax, the story ended and leave a huge space for the readers’ imagination. What is the author trying to say, why is a girl being easily seduced by a stranger, how is it connected to the concept of those days? The questions above will be discussed below. The novel has cause a huge discussion among the critics. Some say the story is about the loss of virginity of Connie, some say it is a religious story about the encounter with a demon. What I saw from the novel is the rebellious and thirst of freedom of the little girl Connie. “She was so plain and chunky and steady that Connie had to hear her praised all the time […] until Connie wished her mother was dead and she herself was dead and it was all over” Connie has a sister who is a good girl and her parents always tell her to learn from her sister. However, Connie’s action toward the good behavior and virtuous is to laugh at her sister and loathe her sister. She cares a lot about her looks. She likes to glance into the mirror or check other people’s faces to make sure she looks ok because she wants to attract more boys. From all the descriptions of Connie’s life in the novel, we can see that her life is really hollow. She does not care about many things and she felt depressed in the family. Deep inside in Connie’s heart, what she wants is just to get rid of her life and take a good grip of her life. “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.” The only thing she cares about and the only goal she holds is to see and feel the idea and feeling after she hangs out with a boy. If there were really someone who can give her these ideas and feelings and take her away from the repression of her family, she would be really happy. This is her sense of love. In fact, the willingness to get rid of her boring life and the desire for love are exactly what Arnold Friend used to get Connie out side the house. “he had shaggy, shabby black hair […] His sideburns gave him a fierce, embarrassed look, but so far he hadn't even bothered to glance at her. […] It was the same program that was playing inside the house.” With a shaggy hair like a rock star, nice radio playing the same program as her house and a nice car, the stranger kept Connie’s attention at first. Talk to Connie with sweet words and tried to take Connie to a ride like a old friend trying have a romantic love, Arnold Friend looks like a ideal person for a romantic love for girl like Connie. Use the psychological hint that he knows all about Connie like a god and tell Connie about how bad her house is (like what she thought before), Connie gradually loses control and surrenders to him. From some aspects, Arnold Friend is a symbol of the dark side of Connie. PART2 Over all the article is pretty easy to understand.
The storyline is very simple and straight forward. However, there are still some things I don’t understand and have to use a dictionary.
The first thing that bothers me is the words of Arnold Friend. There were words said by him like “Don’tcha" “ain’t" “Toldja” “dope” … I first thought they were just mistyping of the PDF version so I just pass these word and goes on reading. But after talking to a American friends I realize that they are words that show a person is cool and modern. That help me better understand the character. I realize that Arnold Friend is created by the author as someone Connie would like to be but can’t be. Even in the tone of talking.
There is also a sentence I did’t understand. “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.” After checking I understand that this is when Connie is dreaming about boys and this sentence shows that how much Connie cares about the other boys. This sentence also hinted that Connie will eventually be seducing by the good-looking and cool
stranger. The thing I learned from these the misunderstanding is that there will not only be misunderstanding of words but al the back ground misunderstanding. I should try to read more so that I know about the meaning of different ways of talking. For a misunderstanding of a sentence, the best way is to break the sentence up by words and try to understand it part by part. PART 3 The thing I am most confused about is Connie’s reaction when she first heard the car and saw the stranger. She became nervous the second she heard the noise of the car as if her instinct is telling her that danger is coming. The depiction of Connie’s life shows that she desired to be taken by someone and go for a romantic love. However, she got afraid the moment the opportunity came. It is also hard to tell whether the story is the reality of Connie or just a dream. “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 sense shows that she was sleeping before the the stranger came. The absurd of the stronger and the story can actually make sense if it is just a dream and Arnold Friend is just the dark side of Connie that she is afraid to be but still wants to be.
Where Are You Going, Where have You Been by Joyce Carol Oates is a tale of a naive young lass taking her first steps into the illusion of the teenage dream. For the regular viewer of the film Smooth Talk, one would not pick up on the elaborate history behind the movie. Dating back to the 1960’s, the written story sheds very little light on the true sadistic nature of the means and intentions of Arnold Friend. Going back even further, the written tale is based on Life Magazine's article “The Pied Piper of Tucson” the true story of a middle aged man who preys on adolescent girls, getting away with devious sexual acts and sometimes murdering said adolescents. Without this previous knowledge, both the story and the movie seem for the most part innocent, with only a tad of creepiness generated
In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, Oates wants to show a more intellectual and symbolic meaning in this short story. Oates has many symbolic archetypes throughout the short story along with an allegory. Oates uses these elements in her story by the selection of detail and word choice used. Oates does this because she wants to teach her audience a moral lesson.
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..."
stuffed boots; these features led her to believe he was not a teenager, but in
Arnold Friend takes advantage of Connie’s teenage innocence for something of a much more sinister purpose. Connie thought she had it all figured out until Arnold Friend came into her life and up her driveway on one summer, Sunday afternoon and made her realize how big and scary the world can be. Arnold embodies everything that Connie has dreamed about in a boy, but is in the most malevolent form of Connie’s dream boy. She always wanted to get away from her family because she has always felt as if she didn’t belong and Arnold can make this possible just in the most predatory way. She always thought sex would be sweet (and consensual) and that she would be in charge of how it progressed, Arnold strips her of the authority she’s held in any other encounter with a boy. The moral of the story is always be careful what you wish
Agatha Christie once stated, “Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions” (Thompson). In a perfect world, there is no such thing as crime and every action committed by a person has a positive outcome. But knowing there is no such thing as a perfect world, incidents happen. The Federal Bureau of Investigation declared recently that crime has risen .7 percent since 2011 (Department, U.S Justice). With a brief love for crime and violence, Joyce Carol Oates conveys these unjust acts of disobedience into short stories. Though her stories prove intriguing, and her details of physical characteristics are exact, she lacks the realistic details of an actual killer. Presented in her short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Oates character Arnold Friend lacks the potential to kill in comparison to Charles Schmid. The real life serial killer Arnold depicts. Schmid is a much scarier killer with a more demented mindset.
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...
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).
Connie has the need to be viewed as older and as more mature than she really is, all the while still displaying childlike behavior. She shows this childlike behavior by “craning her neck to glance in mirrors [and] checking other people’s faces to make sure her own was all right” (Oates 323). This shows that Connie is very insecure and needs other people’s approval. Although on one side she is very childish, on the other side she has a strong desire to be treated like an adult. This longing for adulthood is part of her coming of age, and is demonstrated by her going out to “bright-lit, fly-infested restaurant[s]” and meeting boys, staying out with those boys for three hours at a time, and lying to her parents about where she has been and who she has been with (Oates 325, 326). “Everything about her ha[s] two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home” (Oates 324). Even her physical movements represent her two-sided nature: “her walk that could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearin...
...tomy between reality and dreams quite well throughout her piece. She provides the reader with two ways to experience the story: either as reality or as reality that turns into a nightmare. This dichotomy that Oates creates “allows the reader to escape this story, and allows this story to end” (Hurley 374). The end of the story shows Connie entering the new world of experience, and Oates wants the reader to sense her fear. Oates intricately provides the reader with clues that help see why Connie’s experience with Arnold is just a nightmare. She also allows the reader to see how this nightmare is meant to scare Connie into making the realization that her decisions have consequences. I hope that anyone reading this learns from Connie that not everything we do is good for us, and we have to think about the consequences of our actions, whether good or bad, before we act.
Her exposition is painstaking. She sets the scene by making the main character and protagonist, Connie, parallel to an average girl in the sixties. Oates' narrator introduces Connie using elements of description which puts emphasis on the vanity of the main character. Connie's mother is quickly introduced and is used by the narrator to reveal how much disdain her mother has for her vanity. The narrator uses the main character's mother to introduce her sister, June.
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 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.
Rubin attempts to convey the idea that Connie falls asleep in the sun and has a daydream in which her “…intense desire for total sexual experience runs headlong into her innate fear…” (58); and aspects of the story do seem dream like - for instance the way in which the boys in Connie’s daydreams “…dissolved into a single face…” (210), but the supposition that the entire episode is a dream does not ring true. There are many instances in which Connie perceives the frightening truth quite clearly; she is able to identify the many separate elements of Friend’s persona - “… that slippery friendly smile of his… [and] the singsong way he talked…” (214). But because of the lack of attachment with her own family, and her limited experience in relating deeply to others, “…all of these things did not come together” (214) and Connie is unable to recognize the real danger that Arnold Friend poses until it is too late.
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by Joyce Carol Oates is a fictional short story about a perverted man trying to take a 15 year old girl from her home. Through setting, characterization and dialogue Joyce Carol Oates successfully achieves the idea of Arnold Friend as a symbolic satan.