Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

In the danse macabre tradition of the late middle ages, the inevitability of death was celebrated as a unifying aspect of human existence. This gave rise to countless artistic renditions in various mediums of skeletons united in dance, often seen playing instruments. In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, Oates investigates the regalia, rituals, and power of music on youth culture, framing the clothes associated with the movement as uniforms and its fans as disciples. At the drive-in restaurant, the music is the soundtrack of the moment and a signal to intruding surrealism, “the music was always in the background, like music at a church service, it was something to depend on” (251). As the radio lulls Connie to sleep, she examines her recent romantic conquests in the context of music: “[H]er mind slipped over onto thoughts of the boy she had been with the night before and how nice he had been, how sweet it always was [...] the way it was in movies and promised in songs” (253). These instances frame the narrative’s central arc which plays out in the story’s conclusion.

Music seems to conspire against Connie in its apparent allegiance to Arnold Friend, who appears keeping time as “he tapped one fist against the other in homage to the perpetual music behind him” (258). He also speaks in a sing-song lilt, “exactly as if he was reciting the words to a song” (257). In these ways and others, Arnold seems to be born of the music. He succeeds in winning Connie’s attention because he dresses in the correct clothes and has the right opinions on good music. Wherever Arnold Friend enters the text, music is also present, as is the case at the burger shop and on the afternoon of the story’s final scene. When Connie wakes from her revelry and meets Arnold in her driveway, she finds that Friend’s companion Ellie is playing the same music she had been listening to inside on his transistor radio: “[N]ow Connie began to hear the music. It was the same program that was playing inside the house” (255). As the narrative’s linear realism distorts into abstraction, the music becomes steadily more invasive and central, alluding to the possibility that the story’s final act takes place inside of Connie’s dream or something more sinister.