Where Are You Going Where Have You Been Summary

“What is Lost Must Be Found”
Joyce Oates short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, tells a story of a 15-year-old girl Connie, who is vain, beautiful, rebellious and loses her self identity . However, in her mother’s eyes she will never be as successful as her responsible, not so attractive, college graduate sister who lives at home. One day while her family is out at a family gathering, 2 strange men arrive at Connie’s house and call for her to come out. She quickly recognizes the man driving the car as, Arnold Friend, a man from the drive-in restaurant she frequents with her friends. Although Connie is initially endeared by the fascinating stranger, she begins to notice he is clearly not the age he claims to be, and is in fact much older. As she grows more anxious, and refuses to go for a ride

Connie is a round character, “Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home”, writes the nararrator. Everything was different when she was not home, her walk, voice, laugh, appearance, and her true self seemed split. In the start of the story, Connie is able to keep these two selves entirely seperate, until her experience with Arnold. Here her sexual, flirtatious and confident “friend self” collides with her sweet, shy, innocent “family self” for the first time. She is unable to handle this collision of her two selves and we see her realize she has lost sight of her identity. This shift in herself makes her character very dynamic, Connie loses her collected and “mature” self and “she cried for her mother”. Connie’s vanity, and immaturity, don’t allow her to ever find her true self. Although she was able to fake maturity through her sexuality, and actions, when it came down to actually getting the attention she wanted she realizes she is not who she was pretending to be and that it was to