In her short story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been, Joyce Carol Oates presents us with a well known maxim: children cannot wait to get older. Tired of her boring and powerless childhood, Connie, the main character, searches for cheap thrills she likens to adulthood. Thus, Connie’s surreal experience (Arnold Friend’s sudden and unwanted appearance in his car) represents a suppressed fear of the inevitable and unknown - growing up. Connie, a stereotypical fifteen year old girl, views her life and her family with dissatisfaction. Jealous around her twenty-four year old sister, June, despite June’s outward plainness, and tense around her irksome mother, Connie escapes to the mall with her friends. She and her clique of friends feel like they own the place, and the rest of the world: “Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home…” (1-2). The sense of freedom intoxicates them. Sometimes, they sneak across the street to a drive-in restaurant. Crossing from one world to the next, they leave the well known layout of the mall and adopt the turf of the older kids. They went up through the maze of parked and cruising cars to the bright-lit, fly- infested restaurant, their faces pleased and expectant as if they were entering a sacred building that loomed up out of the night to give them what haven and blessing they yearned for (2). Here, they rid themselves of average, familial and school-age problems and bask in the glory of teenagerdom, drinking from their Holy Grail of liberty. Here, listening to “the music that made everything so good” (2), they finally taste the maturity they yearn for. However, growing up often comes too quickly. A boy, Eddie, soon arr... ... middle of paper ... ...ate. As the last lines of the story suggest, despite her terror through the piece, she is finally forced to accept her future: “…the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him - so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it” (9). After spending so much time acting more grown up than she actually was, she now must face the truth of growing up, despite her trepidation, like all children. With complex themes and multifaceted symbols, Oates presents a girl so eager to grow up, but not yet ready to face what that truly entails. Arnold Friend represents the bare actuality many children ignore when looking at the far unlit unknown of adulthood and growing up. In essence, this story acts as a way to warn “be careful what you wish for” and “life’s not all it’s cracked up to be”.
Throughout Baby’s life she has experienced many cases where she has lost her innocence. Baby is young enough to bring her dolls around in a vinyl suitcase, yet old enough to experience more than she should about the world’s hardships. Baby and Jules had a lot of misfortunes in their life, and Baby’s vulnerability contributes to her misfortune, in being unable to differentiate between right and wrong, due to her desire to be loved; which Jules always failed to show her. There are many reasons why young adults feel the need to grow up fast in the adulthood world but in the end it’s not worth it. The childhood stage is overlooked and that’s the most important stage of life that young adults should cherish, because you only live through it once.
due to her family leaving to attend a barbeque. Like Chet, Connie also has to rely on herself to overcome her obstacles, such as the threatening Arnold Friend. Stegner and Oates both use this plot point in order to establish that their characters cannot rely on their family for help or protection, which emphasizes their transition to adulthood. In Stegner’s depiction, the purpose seems to be the successful overcoming of obstacles that a child, specifically a boy, has to go through in order to become a man.
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).
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.
In the short story, Connie is a young, naïve, sassy, little girl who hates her mom and sister. According to Oates, “Connie wished her mother was dead” (324). Connie enjoys going out with her friends and going to a drive-in restaurant where the older kids hang out. Connie is innocent, but thinks about love and sex. She is desperate to appeal to boys and succeeds at it when a boy with shaggy black hair says to her, “Gonna get you, baby” (325). Her encounter with this boy will change her life forever, because he is the antagonist that influences Connie’s loss of innocence. On a Sunday afternoon, the boy, Arnold Friend, visits Connie and asks her to come for a ride, which she declines. But, Arnold Friend won’t take “no” for an answer and threatens to go in the house. For example when Connie says she will call the cops, Arnold says “Soon as you touch the phone I don’t need to keep my promise and come inside”
Joyce Carol Oates begins the story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been by addressing Connie’s “habit of craning her neck to glace into mirrors or checking other people’s faces to make sure her own was all right” (316). This is interesting because when Connie’s personified death, Arnold Friend, arrives honking at her driveway, her very first instinct is to check and see how her looks. This later plays a role when Friend asks if she would like to go for a drive in his topless car where her hair will be blown around. To Connie, “gawking” (316) herself, was a form of making herself feel high and beautiful but she had two sides of doing everything, “one way when she was at home and another way when she was away from home,” (317). Linda Wagner
During the teenage years they no longer want to be labeled the “child; matter of fact, they have a strong desire to rebel against the family norms and move quickly into adulthood. This transition and want for freedom can be a very powerful and frightening thing as there are evils in this world that cannot be explained. Most parents try to understand and give their teens certain freedoms, but at what expense? Joyce Oates gives us a chilly story about a teenager that wanted and craved this freedom of adulthood called “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”. This is a haunting story of a young girl by the name of Connie who gives us a glimpse of teenager transitioning from childhood with the need for freedom and the consequences of her actions. Connie is described as a very attractive girl who did not like her role in the family unit. She was the daughter who could not compare to her older sister and she felt her Mom showed favoritism towards her sister. Connie is your average teen who loves music, going out with friends, and she likes the attention she receives from boys. During this time, Connie is also growing into her sexuality and is obsessing with her looks as she wants and likes to be noticed by the opposite sex. Her sexual persona and need to be free will be what is fatal to her character’s life and well-being.
First, Currie outlines the idea that youth drift into an apathetic state of “whatever” rather than simply seeking out delinquency. In this perspective, it is a gradual slide from conformity to offending brought about by increasing apathy rather than a large, traumatic event. This slide is largely a...
At the age of 9, a little girl is counting down the days until her next birthday because double digits are a big deal. Now she is 12 and is still counting the days until she can call herself a teenager. For years people cannot wait to be another year older… until they actually become older. As people grow up they accept that maturing means taking on responsibilities and adulthood. Having sleepovers and play-dates, taking naps, and climbing the monkey bars becomes taboo. The simplistic life of a child quickly changes into the dull reality of school and work. People will spend years wishing they were older; but when the time comes, they hope to go back to their innocence. In The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger writes a stream of consciousness
Connie was influenced by many. damaging sources that prohibit her from achieving a proper self-identity. As a result of being neglected by her father, denigrated by her mother, compared to her sister and her desire to be Loved by her family and others, she developed an identity problem that ultimately led her to the devil. It is not until the very end, through her acquaintance with Arnold Friend, that she is able. to achieve some sort of happiness.
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...
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
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...
In the story “Through the Tunnel,” the author, Doris Lessing, tells a story of the reality of growing up. The main character is Jerry, an eleven year old English boy who is on vacation with his mother. When he meets a group of boys, his only wish is to be a part of them. Jerry shows maturity by wanting to make new friends, but also becomes immature when they don’t have quite the same idea. Lessing creates a compelling narrative about self conflict to impress others and yourself. Lessing shows how determination is pushed to the limit through Jerry’s journey to maturity.
Everyone living on this Earth has or will go through the process of growing up. This is a constant, never changing fact that we must all encounter the challenges of maturing to become an adult. One story that illustrates these concepts is Doris Lessing's’ story “Through the Tunnel,” a story about a beach, a bay, and a boy named Jerry. It shows how the main character changes from boy to young man. In Doris Lessing’s short story, she illustrates the challenges of maturation using symbolism and characterization.