Final Analysis

   I'd like to analyse the story, which I have read recently. It is entitled "Where are you going, Where have you been?". The story is written by an American 

novelist, short-story writer, and essayist 

Joyce Carol Oates, pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly  (born June 16, 1938, Lockport, New York, U.S.). 

 Her notable fiction works include A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), them (1969; winner of a National Book Award), Do with Me What You Will (1973), Black Water (1992), Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang (1993), Zombie (1995), We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), Broke Heart Blues (1999), The Falls (2004), My Sister, My Love: The Intimate Story of Skyler Rampike (2008), Mudwoman (2012), Daddy Love (2013), Carthage (2014), and Jack of Spades (2015). Her forays into young adult fiction included Big Mouth & Ugly Girl (2002) and Two or Three Things I Forgot to Tell You (2012).

   

Oates also wrote mysteries (under the pseudonyms Rosamond Smith and Lauren Kelly),plays, essays, poetry, and literary criticism. Essays, reviews, and other prose pieces are included in Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going (1999) and In Rough Country (2010). In 2011 Oates published the memoir A Widow’s Story, in which she mourned her husband’s death. The Lost Landscape: A Writer’s Coming of Age (2015) is a memoir elliptically documenting her childhood.

   According to the title, I think that it is thought-provoking and misleading. When I read it, i tried to think over the events in the plot, whom these questions may be asked and why. My suggestion before reading was that this story would be about romantic relations between two people, like a love story with a happy end but I was wrong. This story describes evil in the society, that the world is not idealistic, that it's very complicated from different points of view. 

   The story is presented as a 3rd-person narration, so the reader is a viewer of the events. The author did her best in describing everything in details, so the reader can easily become absorbed into the story, to feel the period of time, which the story describes. The reader finds himself in America in 60s. 

Though the actual location of the story is irrelevant, the reference to the radio show Connie listens to, the “XYZ Sunday Jamboree,” may be a reference to radio station WXYZ in Detroit, Michigan, the area in which Oates lived at the time the story was written.

   The story introduces us to Connie, a pretty but air-headed teenager who seems terribly ordinary. She doesn't get along with her mom, she's annoyed by her sister, she likes listening to music and watching movies, and she spends a lot of time going out with her friends and meeting boys. Nothing too exciting going on here, until… 

In the parking lot of the diner, Connie encounters a mysterious stranger. When Connie first meets Arnold, she doesn't know who he is; he's just a creepy guy in a parking lot who threatens her in a vague kind of way.

   So, Connie is the protagonist of the story. She is a fifteen-year-old teenager, who is always daydreaming. As all teenagers, she faces difficult transition from childhood to adulthood. 

She is rebellious, vain, self-centered, and deceitful. She is caught between her roles as a daughter, friend, sister, and object of sexual desire, uncertain of which one represents the real her: "Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home." She is deeply romantic, as shown by her awareness of popular song lyrics, but she is interested more in the concept of having a boyfriend than the boyfriend himself. She sees the boys who exhibit interest in her primarily as conquests who "dissolved into a single face that was not even a face but an idea." All of these traits make her vulnerable to Arnold Friend's manipulation. 

   

Arnold Friend, the story’s primary antagonist, is a strange and ambiguous character. He seems to be a devil, a very real psychopath and a supernatural being, and I think, that Arnold Friend’s identity is unclear. While Connie’s character is rooted in her emotions, relationships, and history, Arnold Friend simply appears, without a background. Throughout the story it becomes clear he is not who he pretends to be: he sports a wig, stuffs his boots, and paints his face. More disturbingly, he is a couple decades older than what he claims to be. Arnold Friend is skilled in manipulation, using Connie’s vanity and curiosity to lure her into a conversation where he can assert control over her. His intentions, usually interpreted as rape and murder by critics, are almost certainly malevolent.

   As for the vocabulary, which is used by the author, it is vivid. Mainly, it is colloquial, comprising slang, dialects, vulgarisms. It is caused by the  main characters of the story. Arnold's speech is full of dialectal words, for example, "Gonna get you, baby,", "Toldja I'd be out, didn't I?

", 

"Don'tcha like my car?", "Can'tcha read it?", "I toldja shut up, Ellie". The vulgarisms, like jerk, dope, nut, goddamn, creep are also used in the story. The aim of using colloquial vocabulary is to show emotional state of characters, to demonstrate them as teenagers. 

   I think, that the author used a lot of stylistic devices for vivid descriptions of protagonist and antagonist of the story. The first device, which I mentioned, is simile, because it was used very often.  The first use of a simile was to effectively contrast Connie’s behavior, in this instance her laughter, at home and in public: "…her laugh, which was cynical and drawling at home—“Ha, ha, very funny,”—but highpitched and nervous anywhere else, like the ringing of the charms on her bracelet." The image of a jingling charm bracelet, often associated with teenaged girls, let me imagine Connie’s laugh as youthful. This contrasts with the more masculine “cynical and drawling" laugh she employs at home. The dual laughs exemplify the split in Connie’s personality.

   The descriptions of Arnold Friend were also full of similes. The author always compared him with someone for giving vivid and bright description of him: "And his face was a familiar face, somehow: the jaw and chin and cheeks slightly darkened because he hadn’t shaved for a day or two, and the nose long and hawklike, sniffing as if she were a treat he was going to gobble up and it was all a joke". Oates compares Arnold Friend to a hawk, a bird of prey, and insinuates he would like to eat Connie, reinforcing the connection between him and a natural predator. The use of the word “sniffing” adds to the animalistic impression of Arnold Friend; it is even easy to imagine him smelling Connie as a dog might sniff at its food. Arnold Friend may represent a particularly violent and aggressive hunter, but Connie lives in a world where men regularly look to victimize women. 

   "One of his boots was at a strange angle, as if his foot wasn’t in it." It is left only to imagine what was wrong with the angle of Arnold Friend's boots. I can suggest something unnatural, that's why I'm a little bit confused because of this simile. 

   There is also one interesting metaphor of Connie's house, when it was compared to the cardboard house: "This place you are now—inside your daddy’s house—is nothing but a cardboard box I can knock down any time." It sounded like a threaten, that he could easy get Connie and the house won't protect her from him. It seems that this house is made of cards and it could be blown by the wind. Moreover, the house is the symbol of a family, its tradition, so if Arnold threatens Connie in such a way, it means that he threatens to ruin her childhood world because at home she was a child, but outside - she pretended to be a woman. 

   Describing Arnold Friend, the author called his appearance contradictive, not corresponding to his age, using oxymoron: "the face of a forty-year-old baby". That's why Connie was surprised, when Arnold said that he is eighteen. 

   The number of metaphors are seen in Connie's desciptions, firstly, to show her as a teenager who is always daydreaming: "to a single face that was not even a face but an idea, a feeling", secondly, to show her emotions, particularly, in the moment of fear, panic: "Connie felt a wave of dizziness rise in her at this sight and she stared at him as if waiting for something to change the shock of the moment, make it all right again. Ellie's lips kept shaping words, mumbling along with the words blasting in his ear.", “She was hollow with what had been fear but what was now just an emptiness”.  

   My impressions are not specific. I definitely liked the story, especially, the way how Connie's emotions, feelings were expressed. I even felt her fear! The descriptions of protagonists and Connie's relatives were detailed, so it was easy to imagine everything.

    The only thing that I see disappointing is the relations in the family. It's such a pity that Connie wasn't treated as a beloved daughter, like her elder sisted was. It's a common situation in the majority of modern families where there are 2 or more children that one child, who does everything what parents like, is treated good, but the other one, whose behaviour, actions disappoint parents, is treated in another way.

      But I think the key point of the story is the manipulation. The way how Arnold Friend talked to Connie was a powerful manipulation, persuasion. He was like a magician who knows everything and control everything. So the Connie's fear is reasonable.

     The story doesn't have an ending, on the one hand, so we can develop the idea of what happened further with Connie. But on the other hand, I had an idea, while reading, that Connie past away and everything, that happened was in her subconsciousness. Arnold seemed to be like an Angel of Death, who came to take Connie with him. That's just my opinion and I'm not sure about it. Maybe I've just seen a lot of supernatural series. But that's also my impression of the story. I'll definitely recommend it to my friends from other groups and outside the university, because it is worth reading.