Research from Analysis Paper:
Where Will you be Going, Exactly where Have You Been?
The characters in Oates’ tale are so superbly crafted that critics and students have had produced enormous amount of literature about those personas. Some experts have suggested that Arnold is the devil and that Connie, the leading part, is the devil’s target. And this certainly may be justified searching closely at the descriptive components surrounding Oates’ narrative explanations. Thesis: Oates has built a story that embraces drastically juxtaposed characters, not just setting the good against the bad, but for paint a greater picture which allows the reader to spot with numerous compellingly familiar traits and motives inside the characters. These characters that Oates gives also looking glass other characters in literature, like Cinderella and the devil.
Setting the Stage intended for “Where Are You Going, Exactly where Have You Been? inch
Critic Brian Wilkie claims that Joyce Carol Oates’ fiction is so “various” in the tone and its subject it appears as though the author set out to craft the stories “that it is impossible to write” (Wilkie, 2006). The character types that Oates brings to your life are “attractively trampy, scary, or delinquent adolescents by underclass or well-to-do qualification, ” in addition to the case of “Where Will you be Going, Exactly where Have You Been? ” The personas seem to complement to Wilkie’s description (Wilkie, p. 1). Indeed, Connie, at 15 and fairly, could in shape that “attractively trampy” woman and Eddie certainly qualifies for the “sinisterdelinquent adolescent”; and Wilkie notes the great most Oates’ brief stories possess a “terrible intensity” in which the “torrent of life” may overwhelm a reader, frequently in a “frightening way” (Wilkie, p. 1).
Moreover, the “great mental power” that Oates exhibits in her narrative is illustrated throughout the “sheer explosiveness of her work” – and in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? ” this explosiveness creeps up on the reader when Connie first satisfies Arnold. Connie “threw her shoulders up and sucked in her inhale with the natural pleasure of being alive, inches which is a way for a young woman to show away her breasts. And rapidly in that same paragraph, a cute youngster in a gold-colored car looked at her, “his lips widened into a grin” and Connie could not resist looking back by him even after the girl “slit her eyes in him”; Arnold wags his finger within a scolding kind of motion (such a parent could warn a child), and said, within an obvious foreshadowing, “Gonna obtain you baby” (Oates, l. 1).
A little later in the story Arnold is trying to coax Connie to get into his car, and wags his finger once again. Her cheeks actually were “warmed” keeping in mind how the girl had revealed him her physical bracelets back that first time she attained him simply by sucking in her breathing. Getting warm physically simply by remembering how she caught his vision with her breasts is explosive writing, and Oates follows that up with a description of Arnold – his eyes were “like chips of damaged glass that catch the light in an mellifluous way” (Oats, p. 4). By showing the reader Arnold’s eyes were like cracked glass, and that he had on “tight denims that revealed his legs and buttocks” and a “tight shirt” with a “sleepy dreamy smile” – these are titillating detailed facts that paint an image that a 15-year-old pubescent girl responds to in a sensuous way. It goes all downhill from there in terms of Connie’s security; her immaturity opens the door for this evil issue to happen with her.
Oates Dramatizes the American Culture
More than creating believable, interesting, exciting characters – and superb tension – in this short story, Oates’ ability to produce a theme through setting and cultural actions is very powerful. The “squalid burger joint” is very much a social image; plus the blaring of Ellie’s a radio station also plays a role in the concept of the sleazy young man out to get a girl for his own pleasure (Slimp, 1999). And as Oates’ excellent narrative continues, the reader can sense a “tightening with the stomach and a brisk of the pulse” as the story leads someone to fully understand exactly what Arnold is up to. Slimp points out that Oates is convinced that America has in many ways become a “cultural wasteland” and that Connie can be caught up in it mainly because she is “shallow and vapid”; Connie’s superficiality is proven by the mere fact that the girl believes the “height of human battling is the annoyance” she activities when her mother chides her (Slimp. P. 1). Moreover, Oates lets someone know that Connie is simple once Connie says she would alternatively die than continue being. The basic life that Connie leads – in a cultural wasteland that an evil but charming boy can seem to glow in – has of course been her path to her ultimate decline, and give Oates credit pertaining to bringing these kinds of personality traits away so properly.
Creating a Incapable Character
The traits provided to Connie show how with a lack of power the girl really is. In the meantime, Oates is well-known being a writer who can bring character types to a stage of realistic look that is abgefahren. Marie Mitchell Olesen Urbanski writes that Oates has shown the reader just how powerless Connie is “from the outset” of the account (Urbanski, 1979). Members of Connie’s family know that Connie is naive and incapable. She is eye-catching, and her sister and her mom are not appealing, but it doesn’t make Connie safe or smart. Connie may be helpless but the lady can decline her relatives, and she does simply by refusing to visit a family eat outside. The reader knows Connie is hooked on music, and in reality it is music, “instead of an apple, inches that fishing lures Connie and causes her center to beat a bit more quickly. By directing this out in the narrative Oates demonstrates a young girl so impressed with music and a beat that she’s taken with Arnold just as she is seduced by the music.
The music idea is present in the description of Arnold: “He spoke within a simple lilting voice, exactly as if he were reciting the words into a song, ” and this fits in with the rapture that Connie experiences when the music visitors her good (Urbanski, l. 1). The music “from her radio as well as the boy’s blend together, inch Oates produces, and this is known as a sexually effective line when ever again provides the reader into the consciousness of seduction. Connie hears Arnold say, “Don’t you know whom I i am, ” which will Urbanski implies is Oates’ way of building a demon of your boy. Urbanski goes on to suggest that in encountering a clever devil like Arnold, Connie is mesmerized. Arnold “slid” out of the car rather than simply stepping out, and his “muscular neck” as well suggests something “reptilian” – and among his shoes was at a “strange position, as if his foot was not in it” (Oates, 201-02).
This power that Arnold displays is partially designed to show how prone and unsuspecting Connie in fact is, and Oates goes to great lengths for the reason that regard. “What else can there be for a girl like you but to be sweet and quite and give in, ” Arnold says. In fact it is clear that Connie is not only “surrendering her virginal chasteness, but bowing to complete forces which in turn her younger coquetry are not able to direct – absolute forces overt which in turn she has not any control” (Oates, 202).
Connie in fact is indeed powerless that she isn’t actually a 15-year-old pretty girl at all inside the big picture of Oates’ approach. She is only the “personification of the female” that Arnold has chosen to pounce on with all his tainted experience and phony appeal, Urbanski claims. Clearly Arnold is showing a hype devil in this story, nevertheless Connie is not the angel juxtaposed to the devil. She is just the “morally vacuous girl-victim” whom gets involved in the devil’s strategy (Urbanski, p. 2).
Connie – A Complicated, Believable Character
Is usually Connie’s break free anything like Cinderella’s break free? Critic Stan Kozikowski shows that while Connie rebelliously goes out going on the family picnic – and with that take action Connie thinks that you will have a pleasurable image resolution – however it ends disastrously, quite totally different to what would be the norm. Cinderella, who have of course escaped the unhappiness of her mean enthusiastic sisters and she did find a pleasant closing. According to Kozikowski, an American girl only wants to “feel good, ” to get attention from those about her, and “to become cherished” – which your woman begins trusting she is capable of from early childhood upon. This is the Cinderella motif in storytelling, Kozikowski continues, which is used by American merchandizing with regards to the “flashy, readily consumable” commodities that sell feminization. And along comes Connie, who is simple but clings to a kind of Cinderella wish that cannot possibly be manifested for a 15-year-old girl who is entranced by beat of music through the power of a boy’s words and appearance.
The truth is Connie can be pretty, reasonably good natured but not secure in her
