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Analysis Of Joyce Oates 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been'

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Joyce Oates carefully crafted the short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” using parallelism, allegories, symbolism, and the theme of vulnerability.
Joyce lived a modest life with her parents and two siblings in Lockport New York. According to an article on Biography.com entitled “Joyce Carol Oates,” she always loved reading, and even before she could write, she would tell stories through the use of pictures. Her secondary schooling began after securing a scholarship from Syracuse University because of an article she had written for her school newspaper. She went on to obtain a master's degree, in a single year, from the University of Wisconsin in 1961. 1961 also marked the year she wed her first, now late husband, Raymond Oates. …show more content…

Arnold Friend serves as a parallel to Charles Schmid, the murderer in Arizona. They each attempted to make themselves look younger, and less out of place at popular hangouts. Charles Schmid aged “twenty three years old when he was arrested for the murders” (Quirk 414). He, like Arnold Friend, ran in circles with students instead of people his age. Arnold’s “whole face was a mask,” (Oates 201) which gave him the appearance of youth. Charles Schmid “often wore pancake makeup” (Quirk 414) to achieve youthfulness; Friend used makeup to achieve the same end goal. According to Quirk and Oates, both men would dye their hair raven black, stuff their boots, and use the modern slang, in order to make their victims feel more comfortable. While each of these men owned a gold colored car, Arnold’s appears to be older than Charles’, however Arnold has a fresh coat of paint and Charles did not. The parallels between the Pied Piper of Tucson and “Where Are You Going” cannot be ignored. Oates, took the story of the Pied Piper of Tucson and transformed it into a work of fiction. Arnold Friend, Connie, appearances, and even the presumed murder scene all appear almost identical to the original story. The few differences between the two stories do not amount to enough to rule out the

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In 1960, an infamous murderer went by the name of “The Pied Piper of Tucson.” This man stood out in the small town of Tucson, Arizona. He wore makeup, had dyed black hair, and a fake mole. Although his appearance was not attractive to older women, he had a charisma and charm that made the younger women fall in love. Coming from a wealthy family, he used his money to lure many girls.

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Carol Joyce Oates’ “Where Are You Going Where Have You Been?” presents how falling into temptation leads to giving up control and innocence. Though her mother is unapproving of her actions, Connie spends her time seeking attention from male strangers. Home alone, Connie is approached by a compelling creature who convinces her to leave her life and join him on his unknown journey. Through disapproving her family, having multiple appearances, listening to music, and her desperation to receive attention from boys, Connie gives up control of herself losing the purity of adolescents and contributing to her detrimental fate. It is imperative that one should not be controlled because of a desire to impress others.

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The short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” was written by the author Joyce Carol Oates in 1966. Oates describes her idea for the story after briefly reading an article about the real-life murderer, Charles Schmid, who lured and murdered three teenage girls (Kirszner & Mandell 523). She uses this idea to create the character, Arnold Friend, and his victim, Connie. Connie is a typical teenage girl portrayed as naïve and self-centered. The short story appears realistic, given that the conflict in the story is based off of real events.

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Where Are You Going Where Have You Been? By Joyce Carol Oates Psychoanalytic Criticism Question How are id, ego and superego represented in “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?” By Joyce Carol Oates?

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Home is where the heart is, but what if home is no longer safe? Joyce Carol Oates explores this concept in her 1966 short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”. On surface level, this story appears to discuss a rebellious young girl named Connie and her confrontation with Arnold Friend, a stalker. The ending leaves the reader to assume that Arnold Friend plans to sexually assault the young girl.

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Connie in Joyce Carol Oates’s story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” desperately wants to be independent from her family, while Gregor Samsa in Kafka’s “The Metamorphosis” pathetically yearns for inclusion. In this story, Oates pays special attention to the mother-daughter relationship and the lack of meaningful communication between them. Connie's mother is an image of the future Connie doesn't want – the life of a domestic housewife. Connie has a love-hate relationship with her mother, with whom she identifies, but at the same time she has to distance herself from her mother in order to establish her independence. On the other hand, The Metamorphosis, a story by Franz Kafka, is about a man who has been transformed into a giant beetle

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The short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates is about a teenage girl named Connie who is in the mist of her adolescent rebellion. She wants to prove her maturity to others and herself. In the story, Oates describes that Connie always lets her mind flow freely in between her daydream. She even creates and keeps dreaming about her ideal male figure in her mind to make her happy and satisfied. Oates allows the reader to step into Connie’s “dream world” through the appearance of Arnold Friend.

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shows the readers that that vanity and lack of self-awareness can make some vulnerable and easily fall for the evilness of the world. Because Connie became vulnerable, she was easily persuaded by Arnold, who was portrayed as the Devil figure and the darkness that exists, to leave her the known safety of her home and to embark on the road to the unclear future. Oates’s story teaches the readers to be cautious of their surroundings and of the people that are unfamiliar to them that live in the same society. That is because even if someone appears to look a certain way they might have a mask that hides the true darkness and evilness that is in their body and

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In the story “The Pied Piper of Tuscon” author Don Moser shares this non fictional story about a serial killer named Charles Schmid who had a side that didn’t follow the norm that people would usually expect. Even though people might have interpreted the story differently, Schmid’s main personality wasn’t a cold blooded killer. Moser would actually portray him as a sensitive, generous, hero to less fortunate and lonely kids. Moser quotes “to the bored and the lonely, to the dropout and the delinquent, to the young girls with beehive hairdos and tight pants they didn’t quite fill out, and to the boys with acne and no jobs, to these people, Smitty was a kind of folk hero”(pg 201). Smitty’s alter ego was one that only he could comprehend.

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She then completed her master's at the University of Wisconsin in 1961, the same year in which she get married to an English student Raymond Smith. Oates then started teaching at the University of Detroit, and by the end of the sixties she moved to work at the University of Windsor in Canada. She and her husband worked as co-editors on the literary publication The Ontario Review. By the late 1970s. Oates took a teaching position at Princeton University.

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In her short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?", Joyce Carol Oates utilizes a variety of literary devices to strengthen the story in its entirety. This short story is essentially about a 16-year-old girl named Connie and the conflict between her desire to be mature and her desire to remain an adolescent. Throughout the story, the audience sees this conflict through her words in addition to through her behavior. The audience is also introduced to Arnold Friend, a rather peculiar man, who essentially kidnaps her. This short story by Joyce Carol Oates functions and is additionally meaningful because of her usage of literary devices.

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The story “Where is Here” ,written by Joyce Oates, begins when a man goes to look at the house he grew up in. He knocks on the door and the dad invites him in, but he declines and just walks around the outer parts of the house. While he is walking outside, the mom of the house tells him to come inside and walk around. The house brings back many good and bad memories that help the reader piece together the strange man's past. The short story, “Where is Here,” has a bleak setting, tortured characters, and supernatural events which help make it an American gothic piece.

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Analyzing Development: “Where is Here?” by Joyce Carol Oates Gothic literature holds an allure that readers and audiences often draw into; its combination of wickedness, mystery, death, and even romance stirs a sensation, a charm no other genre has. Through this charm, Edgar Allan Poe, the "founding voice of American gothic tradition," was able to pioneer interest into many future writers in the American writing industry. Specifically, modern writer Joyce Carol Oates implicated traditional gothic elements from Poe. Using dialogue, diction, and the interaction between characters, Oates carefully establishes the foundations and elements of spookiness into her gothic story—“Where is Here?”

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