Joyce Carol Oates's Short Story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been

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When we are kids, we are all being told never to walk with a stranger to an unknown place, never to climb over a special fence or never to hit someone or anything. But especially when we are at a young age, we tend to do the things we are told not to do. The feeling to break a ‘rule’ let our hearts beat faster for a moment, it gives us a ‘kick’. We all have at least one time experienced that there are some entities in life that we have to figure out on our own. If it is just to put our finger into hot water to see if it is hot, although our parents told us not to do that, because it will burn our finger and hurt. But we will remember that lesson easier when we experience it on our own, than somebody telling us that the water is hot, the experience …show more content…
Joyce Carol Oates explores in her short story “Where are you going, where have you been” how an innocent teenager gets ‘caught’ by the persuasive words of a stranger until she gets to the point where she ‘breaks down’ and gets in the car with him voluntarily. Words and expressions can be very persuasive and surprisingly mind-changing. How often have we been talked into something we actually didn’t want to do? When we read Oates story about the teenage girl Connie, we say ‘don’t do it girl’ and ‘don’t listen to him [the stranger]’. But it is easy to say what we would do in an extreme alluringly situation when we haven’t been in it, it is easy to judge from a place in the audience. When we are in an exhausting and stressful point in our life, it doesn’t matter which age we are, it often doesn’t take much to persuade us and ‘pull’ us on a way that can change our …show more content…
Arnold tells Connie that he is a real man, he doesn’t break promises and that he wants her. He comforts her by saying she is pretty, not like her mother who is blaming her because Connie is pretty. “She [Connie] knew she [Connie] was pretty...” (Oates 899), but it is nice that somebody sees that too. For Connie nothing else matters, being pretty is the only thing she cares about, like for many other girls. In movies the most beautiful girl always gets the man of her dreams and has a happy ending. Most of the girls want to live their life like in a movie, they want to make good impressions and get a handsome guy. Connie is one of those girls and that makes her vulnerable for bad guys. At the end, Connie gets to have a movie like life; first she is a normal beautiful girl with the anxiety to escape her life and she ends up going into a scary stranger’s car. It is just not a good movie; it is a Thriller with an open ending. We don’t know what will happen to Connie after she gets it that car. Oates encourages our fantasy with the ending and wants us to think about the possible
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