“They All Just Went Away” by Joyce Carol Oates is an amazing work. The language used is excellent, the presented descriptive details and events are exact and accurate. However the descriptions of the abandoned houses is upsetting. Still her essay helps the readers to define a family, home and a house and people’s relationships to each other. She did a remarkable job in presenting the stories about particular people and events that happens in each house. This gives the readers the feeling that some of them might have experienced stories. In this essay I will mention two stories that relates to the author’s story. Oates's essay reminds me of my Canadian friend Ashley in sixth grade in Montreal Canada. She was in my art class. Ashley was a quite polite girl. One day, I saw Ashley sitting alone at the back of the …show more content…
So I sat beside her then started making a conversation with her. At that moment, I noticed that she had something hidden in her heart like a secret or something that made her uncomfortable. When I asked her why she looked sad all the time? She told me that she had an alcoholic father. She mentioned that her father was treating them badly, and torturing her mother and her sister. I felt sorry for her because she told me that one day, she had witnessed her father yelling at her mother for some money to buy alcohol. At that time, her mother was screaming and crying, as she couldn’t tolerate being hit by him. Then her mother took her daughters and ran away to her grandmother’s house. Till one day, the father showed up at the grandmother’s house. That moment she saw him from the window in order not be recognized by the mother. As soon as she opened the door he chased her around the house and
As the story progresses we come to understand the reason behind all of this. Unfortunately her home life is not the best as she lost her brother and her mother a victim of attempting
Her father had kept her very sheltered. After her father dies she is left all alone. For three days she refuses to acknowledge his death, until the towns man makes
A search for Independence: A Literary Analysis of Oate’s “Where are you going, Where have you Been?” Joyce Oates wrote the short story, “Where are you going, Where have you been?” in 1966. The story that was inspired by a serial killer who preyed on young girls, became an instant classic. “Where are you going, Where have you Been?” is about a young girl, Connie, who is very self-centered, vain, and focuses on her looks without much regard for anything else.
In Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” the setting of the screen door created a fragile barrier between the evils of the outside and the safety of the home. In classic storytelling, the home is seen as a refuge, a safe place for the protagonist to be and the forest, the sea, the mountains, the desert, the world around their home or town is seen as deadly or dangerous. The world outside of the home or town is unknown and mysterious. Oates in her story takes the idea of the unknown and mysteriousness to the next level, invasiveness.
Journal Entry #8 - “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” 1. The the main character in Joyce Carol Oates’ short story is Connie. Connie’s character does change throughout the story. Towards the beginning, she plays a very headstrong and somewhat childish and vain character without guidance, but towards the end plays a weak, and vulnerable individual.
Joyce Carol Oates’s story, “Where Is Here?” is the haunting tale of a family who receives a strange visitor who tours their home claiming to have lived there as a child. The work is incredibly elusive, leaving the reader with many questions by not naming the characters and mentioning many characters that are never seen. Oates leaves her audience in the dark with this work, but she does give them a few clues as to what is really going on. When the visitor first appears, Oates writes “He had not seen the house since January 1949… he thought of it often, dreamed of it often, never more powerfully than in recent months.”
“The Fall Of The House Of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe and “ House Taken Over “ by julio Cortazar, both Gothic Literatures explaining the lives of those who are too afraid to live, when they believe in buying themselves happiness. In both stories, the setting is based off two extremely large homes that are being taken care of by siblings, both male and female. They end up excluding themselves from each other's lives and begin to follow a routine based of the house. Both keeping you guessing at the end. Did they disappear?
When she was young, she could not process the way her father raised and treated her, so she believed everything he said. When she is able to understand, her tone changes and becomes clinical and critical remembering the way he constantly let her
The story “Where is Here” by Joyce Oates is about a married couple who are being visited by a mysterious man, who they have never seen before. The visitor is walking through their house, seemingly reliving childhood memories. When the stranger says, “I mean, I was a child in this house” this proves that the stranger had lived in the house as a child and had memories of his childhood, but there was no telling how long ago that was. The wife is worried about who the young man is and what his intentions are, she even says “The garage! What does he want in there!”
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.
While reading the 5 fiction short stories there became a common pattern between 3 stories and the characters in them. These stories are “The Rocking Horse Winner” by D.H. Lawrence, “I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen, and “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”. Every character has the mindset to possibly fulfill their goals to better and/or change their lives. “The Rocking Horse Winner” is about a boy named Paul who wants to win his mother’s love and attention. By giving her the life she always wanted.
A simple powerful story of a rural family that contains a returned changed daughter leaves a family in surprise. “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker demonstrates that the theme of the story that consists different views of heritage by using literary elements like characterization, imagery, and settings. Each literary element holds a strong value to define the meaning of heritage from different perspectives of the characters. Alice Walker demonstrates it by Mama, Maggie, and Dee by how they each value their heritage by the things that they have left from their ancestors. To start of with, characterization is the highlights and explanation of the details of a character (“Definition and Examples of Literary Terms Characterization”).
While reading the story, you can tell in the narrators’ tone that she feels rejected and excluded. She is not happy and I’m sure, just like her family, she wonders “why her?” She is rejected and never accepted for who she really is. She is different. She’s not like anyone else
The scene then changes to the narrator’s childhood, a lonely one at it. “I lay on the bed and lost myself in stories,” he says, “I liked that. Books were safer than other people anyway.” The main narrative starts as he recalls a
In John Updike’s “A&P” and Joyce Oates’s “Where are you going, where have you been” there are multiple intriguing similarities and differences between both protagonists. Both stories involve an adolescent 's main character who goes through a type of struggle, however, the severity of their struggles differ greatly. “A&P” includes a young man named Sammy who loses his job grows an attachment to a small group of girls that are regular customers at the shop he works at. The situation in “Where are you going, where have you been?” is much more grim for the protagonist, a young teenage girl, Connie. She is put into a set of circumstances that put her life in danger.