Where Are You Going Where Have You Been

In the story “Hills Like White Elephants” by Ernest Hemingway, we read about two characters, a girl and an American man. The two have short conversations between them, and these conversations can hint of many clues about them and their relationship. In the story, we discover what the characters are like, through what they say, and also through the things they don’t say. The short story “Where are you going, Where have you been” by Joyce Carol Oates is about a teenage girl who is, vain, self-doubting and affixed in the present. She does not know anything about the past or doubts it and has no plans for the future. She argues with her mother and she thinks she is jealous of her. These two stories are a conflict of individual verse self. I will explain how the conflict is similar and different in both stories. The conflict the two stories share would be individual verse self. In the “Hills like White Elephant” the girl, which is called Jig, is forced to make a life changing decision. The problem is that the woman is pregnant and the man wants her to have an abortion. She does not want the abortion but is willing to do so if they are going to be happy afterwards. Jig and the man are having a rather controlled conversation, and the fact that they are having this conversation in a public place might or might not contribute to this control. Even today, when it comes to sex, abortion, and relationships, we might all exercise some control when talking about these intimate details in public. As the couple become frantic, like when the woman says, "please, please, please, please, please, please, please stop talking"(Clugston, 2014) or when the man says, "I might have. Just because you say I wouldn't have doesn't prove anything" (Clugston, 2014) when Jig insinuates that he’s not well traveled enough to have seen white elephants. Though they are both able to get their respective positions across, neither of them is able to articulate why they feel the way they do. As a result they both feel threatened, bullied, accused, and misunderstood. At this point, the tone become subdued, which is what we see in the final two lines of the story: "Do you feel better?" he asked. "I feel fine," she said. "There's nothing wrong with me. I feel fine." “Close against the side of the station there was the warm shadow of the building and a curtain, made of strings of bamboo beads, hung across the open door into the bar, to keep out flies.” (Clugston, 2014) This symbol is overshadowed by the hills and elephants, but the bamboo curtain is still powerful. It sets us up to think about boundaries, thresholds, and separations – all the issues the couple is facing. Jig wants the baby and the man doesn’t, the pregnancy itself acts as a curtain between them, through which only simple things can be communicated clearly. By the end of the story the "curtain" between the man and Jig seems to have turned into a wall. In the story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” by Joyce Carol Oates is a conflict of individual verse self. Connie, fifteen, is preoccupied with her appearance. Her mother scolds her for admiring herself in the mirror, but Connie ignores her mother’s criticisms. Connie’s mother urges her to be neat and responsible like her older sister, June. June, who is twenty-four and still lives at home, works as a secretary at Connie’s high school. She saves money, helps their parents, and receives constant praise for her maturity, whereas Connie spends her time daydreaming. Their father works a lot and rarely talks to his daughters, but their mother never stops nagging Connie. Connie is often so miserable that she wishes she and her mother were dead. The majority of the story, after Arnold Friend shows up, takes place with Connie standing in the doorway. This symbolizes her being stuck between a child and an adult. In the end she chooses to walk through the doorway and into adulthood, saving her family from the violence of Arnold but at the expense of

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