Joyce Carol Oates' "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"
Every person comes face to face at some point in life with vital decisions. Some of the decisions are minor ones, while others can bring turning points in life. In Joyce Carol Oates' "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?' she displays a particular instant in the main character's life. This character, Connie was caught in the difficult transition from her youth and innocence to a doubtful future. Throughout the story Connie alternates between two very different sides of her personality, one side where she is innocent and young, and the other where she is mature. Understanding the magnitude of Connie's character and her interaction with others is key to comprehending exactly how she came upon her final decision.
In her home life Connie is very dissatisfied. First, Connie's mother continuously nags everything she does. Connie is always being compared her to her older sister June who is twenty-four and still living at home. It seems everything Connie does is followed by a spiteful remark from her mother. At one point Connie's mother states, 'Why don't you keep your room clean like your sister? How've you got your hair fixed- What the hell stinks? Hair Spray? You don't see your sister using that junk'(153). The fact that this is written in the second paragraph of the story gives the reader immediate insight into Connie's behavior when she is with her friends later on in the story. At home she lives in her...
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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.
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...
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...
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.
...ica. Anna Hartwell states, “Christianity occupies a central place in Malcolm’s account of white supremacy, in both its global and domestic incarnations” (Hartwell). She also states, “Against this Christian tainted legacy, Malcolm X counterpoises Islam as “the true religion of the black man”. Islamic universalism proffered for him an alternative to U.S. citizenship, which had constantly failed to live up to its promises for African Americans” (Hartwell). Malcolm X had an understandable dislike of the system of white supremacy because it is a system that thrives from people being on the bottom who have higher percentages of taxes taken out paychecks even though they make far less than everyone else. The thing about white supremacy is that it affects in a negative way poor people of all colors, but black people suffer the most for obvious reasons. This was the message
Have you ever been so focused on achieving your dreams that you become unaware of your current situation? When we focus on the goals ahead of us, we fail to see the obstacles and dangers that are in front of us. In order to achieve our goals we involuntarily put ourselves in an unwanted situation. Connie, herself, struggles to achieve her goal of being a desirable girl that turns heads when she walks into the room. She becomes so set on being this girl that she doesn’t realize the danger of the situation. In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Oates utilizes metaphors, diction, and imagery to show how Connie is in a constant tug between her reality and her dreams, and how this confines her freedoms in a world that is surrounded with malevolence.
Joyce Carol Oates is known for stories that have an everlasting effect on readers. Oates writing style was explained best herself, “I would like to create the physiological and emotional equivalent of an experience, so completely and in such exhaustive detail, that anyone who reads it sympathetically will have experienced that event in his mind” (Joslin 372). Oates’ short story Where are You going, Where have you been? perfectly fits the description of her work by placing the protagonist of the story Connie in a very uncomfortable situation with the antagonist Arnold Friend. The story focuses the aforementioned Connie and Arnold, Connie is 15 year old girl who loves the spotlight and all the attention that comes with it. Her beauty and vibrant
Malcolm X had an interesting childhood that ended up shaping how he would end up as an adult. Malcolm had a very large family, he was one of eight children. His mothers’ name was Louise Norton Little. She was a stay at home mom and cared for her children. His father, Earl Little, was a very outspoken Baptist minister and an avid supporter of the Black Nationalist leader Marcus Garvey. This is where his life started to get interesting. Earl's civil rights activism prompted death threats from the white supremacist organization Black Legion, forcing the family to relocate twice before Malcolm's fourth birthday. ( www.malcolmx.com p 1). Earl wanted nothing to do with violence and wanted to keep his family safe from harm. He tried to put as much distance between him and the Black Legion. Despite his efforts to elude the Legion, in 1929, their home in Lansing, Michigan, was burned to the ground. Two years later, Earl's body was found lying across the town's trolley tracks (www.malcolmx.com p 1). Police declared that both of these incidents were in fact accidents and not attacks on the family by the Black Legion. This violent end to Malcolm’s father’s life ...
Where Are You Going, Where have you been? is a short story written by Joyce Carol Oates. The 75 year old American author and professor at Princeton University, introduce the story of 15 year old Connie who is rebelling against her mother’s whishes. A very arrogant and selfish girl that in her world the only thing that matters is how many heads she can turn when walking into a room. Through the story life gives her a test, to confront Arnold Friend, the antagonist of the story; who possesses a nefarious power beyond her own experience.
Oates drew the character of Connie very well - she possesses many of the qualities that teenaged children share. According to developmental psychologists, adolescents become highly critical of siblings, and peer relationships take precedence over familial ties during these years (Feldman, 455). These traits are apparent in Connie’s unflattering description of her older sister June, “…she was so plain and chunky…” (209) and the fact that Connie spends many nights out with friends, but refuses to attend an afternoon picnic with her family (211).
Malcolm X was known by many different names. The first Malcolm Little, his birth name, and who identified with a young man growing up in America would fuel his passion for racial politics. From the jump, Malcolm had the cards placed against him. His father Earl Little “was a Baptist minister” and “a dedicated organizer for Marcus Garvey’s U.NI.I.A.” (pg. 1). It was along with this that the Ku Klux Klan was intimidating Earl Little and his family and the subsequent “alleged” murder of Earl Little by the Black Legion, that Malcolm’s life took a turn for the worst. His mother Louise had a nervous breakdown and was institutionalized which led to Malcolm and his siblings becomes wards of the state. Given he’s grew up without the guidance or protection of parents he started getting into mischief out on the streets. You can even tell from his statement in the book that from an early part in his life he was impatient for things to happen and was more of a go-getter which would later get him into trouble. On page 15, he stated “The more I began to stay away from home and visit people and steal from the stores, the more aggressive I became in my
As a result, “Nearly all agree that when an officer is facing a deadly threat, the proper response is to use deadly force”(Lind). Yes there are many people out there that can be a deadly threat to police officers because the way they are acting but, there are many innocent people that do not affect anyone and still have to be a part of the problem for no given reason. Although a police officer’s proper response is to use deadly force upon someone, there should be other alternatives or ways they can use before going into deadly force and possibly cause someone to lose their live. I certainly do understand that there are certain situations where a cop is coming across someone that is pointing a gun or knife at them and approaching towards them. So therefore them using deadly force would possibly be the right thing to do if they have too, but before using deadly force they should at least try deploying tasers or using bean bag guns to attempt in taking them
According to the Dictionary of Policing, “Force is the exercise of physical coercion by the police in the performance of their duties” (Rappert). While many believe that the use of force by police is not needed and only causes more problems, there are also people who support officers and their use of force in order to protect. Police should be able to use force without opposition to detain people trying to harm others, save their own lives, and stop escalating situations.