Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

“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.” 

In many ways, June and Connie are opposites. Where June is obedient and dutiful, Connie goes her own way, preferring instead to take risks, flirt with boys and spend time with friends. However, Connie later acknowledges that the rivalry is a performance perpetuated by her mother’s fickle favoritism. Connie’s fixation on “trashy daydreams” alludes to her obsession with high romance of popular music, and her various nights out with boys.

“The father of Connie’s best girl friend drove the girls the three miles to town and left them at a shopping plaza so they could walk through the stores or go to a movie, and when he came to pick them up again at eleven he never bothered to ask what they had done.” 

Connie’s lack of any guiding example is a major theme in the story, suggested as such in the title. With no adults willing to monitor the lives of Connie and her friends, Connie is free to traverse dangerous boundaries and to meet boys, including Arnold Friend. Thus, the absence of any individual who asks the story’s titular questions—“where are you going” and “where have you been”—contribute to Connie’s death.

“Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home: her walk, which could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearing music in her head; her mouth, which was pale and smirking most of the time, but bright and pink on these evenings out; her laugh, which was cynical and drawling at home—‘Ha, ha, very funny,’—but high-pitched and nervous anywhere else, like the jingling of the charms on her bracelet.” 

A central theme present in the text is Connie’s ability to switch between identities, and disguises. Her dualistic identity contributes to her inability to discern reality from fantasy. When Arnold arrives, his identity is an extension of the same problem, as he infiltrates her youth culture with his own disguise in the same way Connie does.

“They went up through the maze of parked and cruising cars to the bright-lit, fly-infested restaurant, their faces pleased and expectant as if they were entering a sacred building that loomed up out of the night to give them what haven and blessing they yearned for. They sat at the counter and crossed their legs at the ankles, their thin shoulders rigid with excitement, and listened to the music that made everything so good: the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.” 

At the drive-in restaurant Connie finds solace in the music. Oates frames the experience as a place of worship, alluding to the high importance placed on false idols. Here, Oates shifts away from the close third-person perspective that the rest of the story abides by. In doing so, Oates suggests that all the children Connie’s age function to resist a deep unsettledness, from which only the music offers temporary relief.

“She drew her shoulders up and sucked in her breath with the pure pleasure of being alive, and just at that moment she happened to glance at a face just a few feet away from hers. It was a boy with shaggy black hair, in a convertible jalopy painted gold. He stared at her and then his lips widened into a grin. Connie slit her eyes at him and turned away, but she couldn’t help glancing back and there he was, still watching her.” 

Overcome by the revelry of her night out with Eddie, Connie she notices Arnold watching her. Arnold’s appearance at the drive-in restaurant at once contradicts the aura of safety and satisfaction Connie feels while also speaking to the man’s menacing intent. In glancing back at him, Connie is obviously drawn to Arnold.

“If June’s name was mentioned her mother’s tone was approving, and if Connie’s name was mentioned it was disapproving. This did not really mean she disliked Connie, and actually Connie thought that her mother preferred her to June just because she was prettier, but the two of them kept up a pretense of exasperation, a sense that they were tugging and struggling over something of little value to either of them.”

As Connie’s summer continues, her family situation comes into clearer focus. At this magnification, an obvious dysfunction is laid bare. Because of her mother’s meddling, Connie resigns herself to playing the role of “pretty daughter” and little else. This dysfunction foreshadows Connie’s final choice to leave with Arnold in self-sacrifice for her family’s safety.

“She went into the kitchen and approached the door slowly, then hung out the screen door, her bare toes curling down off the step. There were two boys in the car and now she recognized the driver: he had shaggy, shabby black hair that looked crazy as a wig and he was grinning at her. ‘I ain’t late, am I?’ he said. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ Connie said.” 

When Arnold comes for Connie and asks if he is late, Oates plays on metaphors and allegories of death’s abrupt arrival in life. As Connie demands to know who “the hell” he thinks he is, she is also a part of the tongue-in-cheek assertions that Arnold is from an unearthly dimension. Through Oates’s clever use of dialogue and slow simmering tension, Arnold’s identity becomes the central thematic question in the story’s remaining pages.

“Connie, you ain’t telling the truth. This is your day set aside for a ride with me and you know it,’ he said, still laughing. The way he straightened and recovered from his fit of laughing showed that it had been all fake.” 

Simulacra and masks continue to occupy the story’s thematic concerns as Connie detects a subtle dubiousness in Arnold’s laughter. When he assures Connie that they had a prearranged meeting, Oates once again asserts Arnold’s role as doom bringer to Connie, building tension and suspense by delaying any direct identification. Arnold’s constant laughing is yet another allusion to his grim reaper identity. 

“Connie looked away from his smile to the car, which was painted so bright it almost hurt her eyes to look at it. She looked at that name, ARNOLD FRIEND. And up at the front fender was an expression that was familiar—MAN THE FLYING SAUCERS. It was an expression kids had used the year before but didn’t use this year.” 

Throughout the story, Connie proves herself to be adept at disguise and code-switching. Now, her skill as trickster becomes a line of defense against Arnold, as she begins to see the seams in his attempt to infiltrate the music and youth culture she identifies with. Recognizing an outdated slang term emblazoned on his car, Connie begins to suspect that Arnold is not the young man he pretends to be. 

“His smile faded. She could see then that he wasn’t a kid, he was much older—thirty, maybe more. At this knowledge her heart began to pound faster.” 

Oates depicts Connie’s dawning realization that she is in danger as a wave of dizziness. As her dizziness turns to full disorientation, Connie approaches the end of her arc, where she sheds childish fantasies and illusion. The gesture’s heightening effect suggests that Connie’s oft-cited break with reality at the story’s end implies an awakening in which she can see clearly for the first time. 

“This is how it is, honey: you come out and we’ll drive away, have a nice ride. But if you don’t come out we’re gonna wait till your people come home and then they’re all going to get it.” 

Sensing she is in danger, Connie becomes hysterical and flees into her kitchen. Although Friend does not follow, he gives Connie an ultimatum, forcing her to choose between her family or herself. This decision forces Connie to confront her own self-interested shortcomings, completing her arc as she trades her life for the lives of her family. 

“She began to scream into the phone, into the roaring. She cried out, she cried for her mother, she felt her breath start jerking back and forth in her lungs as if it was something Arnold Friend was stabbing her with again and again with no tenderness. A noisy sorrowful wailing rose all about her and she was locked inside it the way she was locked inside this house. After a while she could hear again. She was sitting on the floor with her wet back against the wall.”

Oates uses free indirect discourse to blur the lines between Connie’s panic attack and imagery suggestive of her physical violation. As Connie’s panic peaks, so do the narrative’s formal qualities begin to lose their integrity. This technique is a form of literary commentary. As Oates applies free indirect discourse to convey the horror of Connie’s reality, she is in effect suggesting that formal writing techniques have failed to adequately convey the full spectrum of human experience.

“Now, come out through the kitchen to me, honey, and let’s see a smile, try it, you’re a brave, sweet little girl and now they’re eating corn and hot dogs cooked to bursting over an outdoor fire, and they don’t know one thing about you and never did and honey, you’re better than them because not a one of them would have done this for you.” 

Here, Friend’s tone is mercurial, volleying between attacker to sympathetic ally as he coaxes the distraught Connie out of her kitchen. Although he seems to deal nearly exclusively in deception, Friend’s appraisal of her family is arguably an accurate one. Oates gives no textual evidence to suggest any of Connie’s immediate family would have traded their lives for Connie.