In Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You been?” readers are introduced to a young female, Connie, who wants to do be herself. She wants to experience a lot of things and her experiencing got her in a stage where she cannot get out. Oates portray in the story that you should not want to be an adult before your time. Connie had not realize that she is not ready to be an adult because there is a lot of things that she do not understand yet. In Oates’ story she has several themes in which she uses them to get her point. Themes such as Connie’s search for independence, Connie’s fantasy, Connie’s freedom, Connie’s identity disclose that she wants to have her own way and not let others tell her what to…
In addition to the influence of the children’s perspective on the reader’s interpretation of the adults’ roles in the novel, the reader also makes inferences and conclusions about the adults based on their actions. Consider the various failures of the adult characters in this novel: moral failures, the failure to parent well, and the failure to negotiate life successfully, to name just a few. You may choose to analyze only one character and his or her failures, or write a comparative analysis of several characters, but in any case, build an essay in which you posit reasons for the failures of adults to protect children and to offer hope to the next…
The story consists of two primary focus scenes: the world in which Connie flourishes in and the day that everything in Connie’s world changes. The beginning of the story introduces the reader to the protagonist who is young Connie and the central point of the story. Connie is described by Oats as being a…
Joyce Carol Oates uses powerful imagery in the short story, such as the idea of love, dishonest smile, and Connie’s dissociative state. In the idea of love, she uses vivid language to explain Connie’s daydream. The actual desires where not yet tied to concrete the acts or a specific man. Connie’s is being attracted to the idea of love and sex confusing fantasy and reality. The author helps the reader to visualize on how girl’s discrete experiences fading into a deeper impulse. Connie being in the puberty is being pulled by natural forces by the desired that she is not conscious about it and doesn’t have an explanation for it. Another language that Oates uses is she focus on Arnold Friend physical. Connie got to recognized most of the things about him since the moment she met him. Words like thighs and buttocks were mention to show his sexual nature. Arnold friend smile was emphasized as a slippery friendly smile in other words as a dreamy smile. Oates used this term to communicate with Connie to entangle her and easily get her. Finally, she also describes Connie beating heart, this help Connie express her dissociative state. She felt isolated with her physical body, which it perceived it wasn’t really her either. The state of separation she was feeling demonstrate how she was slipping out of control over her own actions and decisions she was making. At…
In Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake we see the cause and effect of how our childhood and how we are raised has a large correlation to what type of adult we become. Through the character of Jimmy and later his new persona Snowman, the reader is shown the detrimental effects of an abandoned childhood. Not only do Jimmy’s poor choices in his adult life have a clear link to his neglected and unguided childhood they also create an adult that is emotionally damaged and unable to see the right path in his life even when he wants to.…
Womack chooses to reflect on the state of future inner cities and current ones by exploring their impact on the youth, specifically an adolescent girl. As Lola begins to assimilate into the culture of the poverty stricken inner city, her narrative dialect changes too. What Womack does here is show that with the depreciation of society, so comes the loss of innocence and youth. In order to survive her new surroundings, Lola must abandon childhood naïveté for subsistence. The loss of structure within society in turn leads to the loss of purity and adolescence, replaced by adrenaline and fear.…
Connie was a young, fifteen-year-old, attractive girl who worked hard to show the appearance of being mature. She created a personality through expressing…
A close reading of Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" reveals many layers of possible meaning, which makes it a fine example of literary merit.…
The primary destruction of Laertes and Ophelia’s psychological success stems from their immense fixation on a degree of the Freudian complex: “the dysfunctional bond with a parent of the opposite sex that one does not outgrow in adulthood and that does not allow one to develop mature relationships with their peers” (Tyson 17). Thus, Laertes and Ophelia constantly suffer from being “driven, by desires, fears, needs, and conflicts of which they are unaware” and in this case, these issues come from the loss of direction and affection from their mother (Tyson 12). This piece of the general Oedipus fixation is more applicable to Laertes as his childhood distress comes from a significant member of the opposite sex in his life. Being separation from…
Beatty began teaching at the school as a person unaware of the frequency or dullness of the news of shootings. She highlights this in her article by drawing the readers’ attention to how routinely the students processed the news. There was no emotion for the students because it was a reality of life, however, for the author and the majority of the reading audience it is not a common occurrence. Beatty uses the mundane reaction of the students to strengthen her pathos by highlighting how desensitized the students are to violence. This point is further proven by the author’s shock to how unemotional Angelica is that her brother had been shot. In doing this she utilizes pathos by introducing readers to the horrible idea of the emotion of a loved one being shot being negligible. In addition to this, Beatty calls to the attention of the readers the lives of slain students. She shows readers how innocent they were and after citing their innocence the author bluntly relays the cause of their horrific death. This writing by the author introduces a character only to rip the image of innocence out of the readers head and replace it with the horrifying reality of murder and death. This use of imagery effectively triggers emotion in readers and is a use of pathos by the author. However, perhaps the most effective use of pathos by Beatty was bringing to the attention of readers that the lives of these kids are not only afflicted by violence, but are hopeless. Beatty features this sentiment saying: “They know how the world sees them, these teenagers with no cars, and no prospects for college.” By bringing the hopelessness of the kids to the attention of the reader Beatty is able to make readers think about their own lives and goals and understand that if they swapped lives with…
In conclusion, Oates utilizes Connie’s setting to create a deeper meaning behind what would be a simple story. The setting encourages the reader to look past the surface meaning, and realize the motivation behind Connie’s actions. The descriptive language paints a clear and vivid image that not only provides a strong tone but also pertinent information to the…
Since Connie is a rebellious fifteen year old girl that fights with her parents and constantly wants to do her own things, she is acting like a normal teenage girl that is of course not yet fully mature. She enjoyed going out with her girlfriends and complaining about the “hard life” she had and the constant nagging her mother gave. One night when Connie picks up a guy named Eddie, she “drew her shoulders up and sucked in her breath with the pure pleasure of being alive, and just at that moment she happened to glance at a face just a few feet from hers. It was a boy with shaggy black hair, in a convertible jalopy painted gold (Oates, 320). Connie constantly tries to ignore this man, who the reader eventually learns is Arnold Friend, yet she cannot look away while he says, “Gonna get you baby” while wagging his finger. This quote could symbolize Connie’s eventual fate since womanhood comes to every girl and Eddie did not even notice Arnold saying anything since men do not understand the way girls enter womanhood. Connie continues to be compared to her wholesome sister June by her mother with a disapproving tone, but Connie returns the favor by taking her mother for a fool. In fact, “Connie thought her mother was so simple that is was maybe cruel to fool her so much”(Oates, 321). This constant bickering between mother and daughter…
Connie’s clothes and infatuation with her own beauty symbolize her lack of maturity or knowing her true self, which in the end enables her to be manipulated by Arnold Friend. Connie was in love with her own beauty. In the beginning of the story Oates states that Connie “knew…
Connie knew she was pretty, and that’s why she had a “giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right” (752). Her beauty brought power over boys. She chose to talk to only the ones that she thought were cute or popular, and she made a point of ignoring the more common ones. “It was just a boy from high school they didn't like. It made them feel good to be able to ignore him” (753). The narrator observes that the world she lived in was a familiar one. Everything was safe, but one single day made her it all…
Her confidence is only shaken when a man tries to oppress her in a sexual way. It is then when Connie realizes that she was not as strong as she thought she was. Due to the panic, Connie started to confuse reality from fantasy. Arnold Friend, takes advantage of Connie’s naïve personality, and tries to control her by threatening her. Joyce Oats describes oppression here as a form of sexual oppression, where woman are constantly being sexually assaulted because society has portrayed and symbolized women as sexual…
