Where Are You Going Where Have You Been Characters

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.

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” is about a teenager named Connie who is trying to come to terms with her transformation from childhood to adulthood. Through this process, Connie attempts to act older than she is an tries to gain the attention of boys. In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” Joyce Oates portrays Connie as obsessed with men to symbolize how one’s obsession and narcissistic attitude can cause danger to seem surreal. In the short story, Carol Oates describes Connie as having two different personalities, one being a narcissistic attitude.

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Essay Since it’s publication in 1966, Joyce Carol Oates’s short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” the character Arnold Friend has caught the attention of many critics and readers. Connie is a fifteen year old girl who has an encounter with Friend while she is home alone one summer afternoon.

In “The Flowers”, Alice Walker explores the woods through the eyes of a little girl named Myop, but she soon realizes the world isn’t as nice as flowers. In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”, Joyce Carol Oates follows a young girl named Connie who is focused on others and her own appearance, until she is introduced to the world in a unexpected way. Both Walker and Oates use young girls to show the harsher sides of the world and how their childhood changes to adulthood in different ways. The main thing that Myop and Connie have in common is that they are both females, but their looks and the way the live are totally different.

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.

In what ways would you transform when presented with a life or death situation? In the prevailing and fast-paced short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by Joan Carol Oates we find out how much a person can change when crucial and demanding situations arise. In this short story the self-indulged protagonist, Connie will have to face her worse nightmares that she believed would be her ultimate fantasy. Connie is a fifteen-year-old girl who, like most young women, are ruled by their hormones and budding sexualities. She is a flighty teen who does not get along with her family and wishes to be an adult.

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.

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 thought, I’m not going to see my mother again. She thought, I’m not going to sleep in my bed again”. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been is a short store by Carol Oates. In the story, Connie was a 15 year old girl, and lived she out in a rural area. She lived with her parents, and her sister June.

Everyone who reads a story interprets the story differently. Each reader has in or her own way of how the story goes on or how it ended. This is called reader-response in reader response the author cares about what the reader thinks and how the reader would interpret his or her poem, short story, or novel. Two short stories for reader-respone are “Where Are You Going Where Have You Been.” By Joyce Carol Oates and “The one who walk away from omelas.”

Connie, the main character in Joyce Carol Oates’ short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is a young woman with palpably low self-esteem. This vulnerability allows Arnold Friend, the main antagonist of the story, to successfully attract and manipulate Connie. The story begins by highlighting Connie’s daily rituals of self-assurance (369). In order to feel secure with herself, even for a fleeting moment, Connie looks at herself in a mirror to make sure that she is satisfied with what she sees; this ritual is coupled with her tendency, when in public, to scan the area in order to make sure that no one is making any disgruntled looks about her appearance (369).

Writer, Joyce Oates, in her fictional short story, “Where are you going, where have you been,” recounts the story of, Connie a fifteen year old. Joyce Oates creates a flippant tone in her character description of Connie. The tone shifts from flippant to disturb after her brief interaction with Arnold at her house. Oates uses emotionally/ominous loaded language, and vivid threatening imagery in Where are you going,where have you been. Oates purpose is to warn readers of what could happen when an adolescent go through the rite of passage.

Karlea Belsey Mrs. Ham English 1302 23 February 2016 “Two Kinds” of Girls “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, written by Joyce Carol Oates in 1970, the main character, Connie, is put in the shadows of her older sister, and she feels as though her mother does not care for her as much as her sister. Connie acts and dresses different when she was away from her family; she tried to fit in with her friends whenever they went to the shopping mall, movies, or to the restaurant across from the mall. On the other hand, in “Two Kinds”, written by Amy Tan in 1989, the main character, Jing Mei, was a Chinese-American whose mother wanted her to be a prodigy in something, and believed that she could be anything that she wanted to be since she was in America. Both of these characters, Connie and Jing Mei, had someone pushing them to do something, but in the end, Connie agreed to her persuasion, while Jing Mei refused.