American Culture In Oates's Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been

In Oates’s Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been by Stephen Slimp, he goes in depth of what this story means to him. Slimp explains how to him one of the best qualities of this short story is “…the way in which the American culture is conveyed with an almost palpable intensity. One can visualize the squalid hamburger joint, hear the blaring of Ellie’s radio and the touch of Arnold’s finger on the screen door. Most amazing, the reader experiences, even with multiple readings, a tightening of the stomach and quickening of the pulse as it slowly becomes clear exactly what Arnold is up to” (179). Slimp believes that Oates writes this narrative in a way portray her belief of the circumstances of American culture in the late-twentieth century.

Slimp also explains that the story has a relation between the physical and spiritual, meaning the balance of physical breath with spirit. He describes how many in cultures the word spirit and breathe share the same word and how Oates used that to help define the relationship between Connie’s understandings of the danger she was in and how that played a role in her spirit in that moment where many times Connie is described as losing her breathe. In this moment we see a not so shallow Connie who seems to have developed a depth of soul that allows her to understand that this is no longer the fantasized world she faced every day. In this moment the world that she once knew and the people she once hated are things she will never see again. As Slimp describes it, “That her attempt has succeeded is shown when she sacrifices herself by going out, at the end of the story, to meet her fate, thereby sparing her family a violent deadly encounter. She has shown herself to be a fully breathing human being, one who has, in a moment, developed the spiritual life lacking in her former