Joyce Carol Oates's 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'

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“Where are you going, Where have you been?" by Joyce Carol Oates, is a fitting title for a short story that asks more questions than it answers. In the story, Connie a fifteen-year-old girl just wants to be grown up, sophisticated, and beautiful in the eyes of others. She lives in a home that disapproves of her and wants her to be more like her failure sister. She then goes out with her friends to shop, eat, and meet new people. Then, Connie meets Eddie and spends three hours with him alone. Later on, Connie is left alone at her house after her family left. While they are gone, a man by the name of Arnold Friend shows up and asks her to come with her. Connie refuses, and he threatens Connie and her family's safety if she does not get in the …show more content…
Connie first falls asleep when she was sitting outside of her house on a sunny day. In the story the narrator states, “Connie sat with her eyes closed in the sun, dreaming…” (311). The most important thing the narrator stated is that Connie was dreaming, and dreaming is directly correlated with sleeping. Also, it is important to state as she fell asleep, she, “Turned on the radio to drown the quiet” (311). This quote is important because it connects Arnold’s voice to someone’s voice in a song when he says, “my sweet little blue eyed girl, he said in a half sung sigh…” (321). Connie didn’t have blue eyes so it must have been a voice that was not Arnold’s voice because he would have known her eye color just by looking at her. Also, the voice of Arnold Friend was, “a fast bright monotone” (312) not a half sung sigh. This voice that Arnold used sounded song-like concluding she had been dreaming, and listening to the radio she left on. Connie awoke to, “vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him”(321) just like in the beginning of the story. When she fell asleep in the sun she wakes up also in the sun. Finally, the vague pronoun he used in the quote most likely pertains to the voice of Bobby King, the DJ on the radio. That would be why the narrator never said Arnold but …show more content…
Connie went out into the world and did things that older people would do such as going out at night, shopping, hanging out etc. Connie tried so hard to be accepted as a grown up woman. Connie went as far as having, “two sides” (309); she would be calm at home, but she would dress and act like a young adult while out in town. Arnold Friend acts as a barrier between her childhood and the things grownups are able to do when he said, “don’tcha wanta go for a ride” (313). Only adults are able to drive, and because she wasn’t old enough to drive away from Arnold she could only run away. Arnold was still a dream, but he represented all the things she couldn’t do because she was a child. Also, Arnold serves as a reminder that if Connie acts like she’s an older individual she will attract the attention of older men such as Arnold Friend who says, “can’tcha see I’m your age” (315). Arnold says this not because he’s lying, but because he’s telling Connie that she was trying to be someone she was not. All these events took place while she was dreaming. In the very end, the story turns into a coming of age story when she goes out of her house to Arnold and, “watched this body and this head of long hair moving out into the sunlight” (321). She watched herself go to Arnold out of the protective shade of the childhood house, and into the sunlit world
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