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Where Are You Going Where Have You Been Arnold Friend Essay

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According to McCabe and Wauchope “The most common type of relationship was that of a stranger, with 55/130 or 42% of rapist selecting a stranger as their victim” (239). While some psychopathic serial rapists may pick someone close to them or someone they know, that is not the case with Arnold Friend. In Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Oates uses Arnold Friend’s stalker tendencies, use of Connie’s weaknesses, and deceiving looks to allow us to view Friend as a psychopathic serial rapist who has committed similar prior crimes. Throughout the story, Connie wants to grow up so quickly and have the attention that she thinks she wants but in reality it is nothing she could ever imagine and by doing this Oates shows …show more content…

When Arnold Friend threatens to hurt her family if she does not come with him, it made Connie go with Friend (Oates 136). Lynn Z Bloom discusses how her and her own class were discussing “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” when she started to discuss her own horrific encounter with a person like Friend. Bloom said that although she started screaming she stopped because, “then I thought, still screaming, ‘I don’t want my children to hear this.’” (825). Although the attacker may have not known about her motherly instincts of protecting her children from all evil in the world, it can be agreed that we put our family above ourselves just like Connie did. By going with Arnold Friend, Connie possibly saved her family from what most likely would have been their deaths. Friend is a psychopath that wanted nothing more than Connie and would probably do anything he had to too insure that he got her. Arnold Friend has gone through many drastic measures to lure Connie into his trap, at this point, nothing should be a …show more content…

Like Charles Schmid, Friend creeps at teenage hangouts in hopes of seeing a girl that catches his eye. Schmid and Friend have many things in common, so it is very likely that Joyce Carol Oates based Friend off of Schmid. Perhaps Oates had a reason for basing Friend off of Schmid, whether she meant to or not; perhaps she was trying to show how this is not just a story, that this could very possibly happen in real-life, because it in fact

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