Adrien Rooney
English – “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”
Paper 3 – Character – Conflict – Point of View – Setting – Language – Tone – Central Idea
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, by Joyce Carol Oates, is the story of
Connie, a teenager who lives with her family in the 1960’s, whose encounter with Arnold Friend
turns tragic. Connie is a typical teenager going through the tribulations of her adolescent years.
She is preoccupied with her looks, her friends, music and boys. She is rebelling against her mom,
despises her sister and hangs out in secret with boys. The story takes a darker turn after she
meets Arnold friend. At first, he seems kind when she notices him in a restaurant. However,
when he shows up unannounced on a Sunday afternoon with his friend Ellie and that she finds
herself alone with them, she notices that he is older and that things do not line up. His words
appear to be kind, but they are veiled with the threat of hurting her, so she quickly realizes that
his intentions towards her are not good. Realizing that she can’t use the phone and that resisting
him is pointless, she walks out of the house towards him to meet her terrifying fate.
Connie is the protagonist in the story. She is a round character because early in the story,
we can see that she is both a flirt and a naïve young girl, a teenager who has romantic illusions
about what love is and who fantasizes about her own love story. This duality in her personality
appears in the following passage: “Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and
one for anywhere that was not home”. Her behavior alternates from being a naïve young girl to
behaving like a sexy, mature seductress and it can be seen in “her walk, which could be childlike
and bobbing, and languid enough to make anyone think she was hearing music in her head”.
Those two sides of her highlight the fact that she is an adolescent searching for herself and that
she is not quite sure of who she really is. She wants her independence and proves that she is
mature and an adult, but the child in her finds comfort in the familiarity and safety of her home.
Arnold Friend destroys her ideas about the safety she thinks she has in her house when he tells
her “It’s just a screen door. It’s just nothing. Anybody can break through a screen door and glass
and wood and iron or anything else if he needs to, anybody at all, and especially Arnold Friend”.
She also reconsiders what being independent really means as she sees that being an adult is
sometimes far from being pleasant as she is going to get physically hurt by Arnold Friend.
Arnold Friend is the antagonist in the story. He is a round character because early in the
story, we can see that he appears both appealing and charming, but he actually is evil in the end.
His nature is also two-sided. He presents himself as a teenager, but he is in fact way older than
that. “He wasn’t a kid, he was much older-thirty, maybe more”. He is attracted by Connie’s
childish innocence and he uses his charming ways to get her to notice him. “He started at her and
then his lips widened into a grin”. He wants to put her at ease when he sees her in the restaurant,
but later on, his casual but at the same time commanding attitude towards her reveals his bad boy
side. Things don’t add up and Connie recognizes that about him as “these things did not come
together”. His evil side is revealed when he threatens her that he will hurt her family if she
doesn’t come out and go with him. He tells her: “This is how it is honey: you come out and we’ll
drive away, have a nice ride. But if you won’t come out, we’re gonna wait till your people come
home and then they’re all going to get it”. He is diabolical and manipulates her into thinking that
he will hurt her family if she doesn’t come out. “Like I said, you come out here nice like a lady
and give me your hand, and nobody else gets hurt”. His threats about her family intensify when
he tells her “This place you are now – inside your daddy’s house – is nothing but a cardboard
box I can knock down any time”. He knows what he is doing by applying psychological pressure
onto the mind of a young impressionable teenager and unfortunately, she caves in.
Connie’s mother, Joyce, is the foil character in the story. The author uses her to reveal
some of Connie’s personality traits and flaws by comparing her to her sister June. The contrast
between June and Connie is revealed through Joyce’s words. Those words cause Connie to rebel
against her mother. The contrast can be seen in the following passage: “Connie had to hear her
praised all the time by her mother and her mother’s sisters. June did this, June did that, she saved
money and helped clean the house and cooked and Connie couldn’t do a thing, her mind was all
filled with trashy daydreams”. Connie’s reckless behavior is a rebellion against the “good girl”
that her sister is. Her mother is relentless in her complaints about Connie as she “kept picking at
her until Connie wished her mother was dead and she herself was dead and it was all over”.
Connie does not want to become like her sister and it causes her to act out.
The first conflict we see is a man vs man conflict. It is the external conflict between
Connie and Arnold Friend. She is a young inexperienced girl in the art of seduction versus an
older man who has used and abused his manipulative words to get sex, sometimes against the
will of the female gender. He announces his intention to her when he “laughed and said, “gonna
get you, baby”. They represent the conflict of innocence against evil. It’s also the story of the
hunted and the hunter. Connie is young, carefree, doing what teenagers do, like “walk through
the stores or go to a movie”. Arnold Friend is an older man wanting to pass for a teenager,
dressing like one in “tight faded jeans stuffed into black, scuffed boots, a belt that pulled his
waist in and showed how lean he was, and a white pull-over shirt”, but he is an older man and
when Connie realizes that things are not the way they appear, “a wave of dizziness rises in her”.
They are both playing the game of seduction, but Connie plays it innocently, like with the other
young boys she has been before, and he plays it in a calculated, risky, dangerous way because
she is his prey. She is the prey, he is the hunter. She has not mastered the art of seduction but he
has. He declares “Yes, I am your lover. You don’t know what that is but you will”. This external
conflict between the two exposes the opposing forces at play: female vs male, good versus evil,
experience vs inexperience, prey and hunter.
The second conflict we see is internal: human vs self. Connie wants to gain independence
from her family and become her own self, different from her sister, but, while she tries to do that
by flirting with boys, she still wants to enjoy the security that her family and her familiar
environment provide. The safety that a small town provides allows her to feel that she can
experience life, but still be safe. This can be seen in the following passage: “The father of
Connie’s best friend drove the girls the three miles to town and left them at a shopping plaza so
