Her name was Joyce. She was an author and had a deliberate playful way of arranging words and sentences to provoke emotion in the reader, or perhaps even in herself. Her words, which spoke much and said much and possessed more power than she may have realized, formed one cohesive story that somehow captured both the whimsical nature of teenage girls and the increasing level of fear and anxiety in the protagonist as the narrative moves forward to its end.

The preceding paragraph was a parody of the opening of Joyce Carol Oates’s short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” It is a story that penetrated me upon my first reading of it many months ago and not for any specific purpose or reason, but rather for its simplicity and effectiveness in capturing both teenage angst and the progression of absolute fear in only a mere few pages.

But what exactly makes this story work anyway? A number of things could be attributed to its success. Like any good short story it has a premise: teenage girl falls victim to predatory (if seductive) man. This premise could have been handled in a great many ways, but Oates opted for a softer, almost lulling, route. There is no sex. There is no violence. There is only brief exposition and conversation. That’s it. Conversation is key in this story.

Dialogue is hardly an innovative device to be used by writers. In fact, it is a rather implicit part of storytelling. However, it isn’t the dialogue which concerns me, but the conversation, the unfolding of a circumstance, a situation. The bulk of the story is a colloquy, yet it is interspersed with thoughts and movements and expectations and observations. And it is here where the story is truly told, where the intrigue is established, the fear built. But the story would nothing without characters.

For the sake of organization and cohesion, I have divided this essay into six areas of examination: the origin of story, characterization, time, point of view, language and execution, and personal response.

The Origin of Story

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is loosely based on Charles Schmid, the Pied Piper of Tucson, who in the mid-1960s murdered three teenage girls. He wore boots stuffed with tin cans and rags to lend height to his five feet three inch frame, he applied generous amounts of make-up to his face to produce the look of a tan and he even drew in a fake mole on his cheek (a “beauty mark” he called it.) The first of his victims, Alleen Rowe, was lured out of her home by Schmid while a friend of his waited in the car.

Most of these details are inserted into Oates’ story, although others remain omitted, perhaps because Oates never finished the Life magazine article that inspired her short story.

Oates had read part of the article printed in Life magazine and thought this killer was such a strange character, with his stuffed boots and awkward gait. Yet to her mind, he embodied something elusive about adolescent culture and its hidden dangers. That such a man had somehow charmed three teenage girls whom he subsequently killed inspired her to write a short story from the point of view of a potential victim. What would it take, she wondered, for a young girl to be lured by a man who obviously had little going for him? What might he have said and done to win her trust and get her to walk straight into her doom? (Ramsland, 9)

Additionally, Oates was inspired by the Bob Dylan Song “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue.” The last verse is especially reminiscent of the story:

Leave your stepping stones behind,
something calls for you.
Forget the dead you’ve left,
they will not follow you.
The vagabond who’s rapping at your door
Is standing in the clothes that you once wore.
Strike another match, go start anew
And it’s all over now, Baby Blue.

The last line is even echoed in the last bit of dialogue of the story, “My sweet little blue-eyed girl.”

Characterization

Who is Connie? She is a pretty fifteen year old girl who knows she is pretty and depends upon that fact. Revels in it even. Lives her life with confidence plucked from the stem of that prettiness (which inadvertently determines her doom.) Her mother and sister are characteristic foils, women who in contrast are nothing like Connie herself. They are plain and lame and worst of all, unattractive. Her father is a working man and as such, the reader gets the sense that he isn’t around all that much in his daughter’s life.

Their father was away at work most of the time and when he came home he wanted supper and he read the newspaper at supper and after supper he went to bed. He didn’t bother much talking to them…

All this information is revealed within the first three paragraphs. This is important to note because the reader is given this information and it will become vital to the story’s rising action and climax as the colloquy with Arnold Friend progresses.

Why does it become vital? Because this is all basic characterization. Every little thing Connie does is determined by who she is. Every time she self-consciously swipes her hair or thinks about “how she must have looked to [others]” or when she “[wonders] how bad she looked” tells the reader just how profound her affinity for her own vanity is to her.

All in all, Connie is not swayed by family obligations. In fact, the reader gets the sense that she does not care much about her family at all.
“Her parents and sister were going to a barbecue at an aunt’s house and Connie said no, she wasn’t interested, rolling her eyes to let her mother know just what she thought of it.”

That is not to say that she is heartless or vulgar or any number of other offensive adjectives. She’s merely a teenage girl who is motivated by external pleasantries fueled by her vanity. “…she knew she was pretty and that was everything.”

Arnold Friend, too, is not without his own distinct characterization. As the reader is given a sight of him he is revealed to dress “the way all of them dressed,” which suggests a conformability and easy assimilation into the masses. His jalopy, as well, provides further indication of Arnold’s ability to blend into the teenage life.

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.

Additionally it is written that “his face was a familiar face, somehow.” And that “he spoke in a simple lilting voice.” Arnold Friend seems to be an everyday man. A normal guy. A. Friend. Of course, the name is meant to be misleading.

Time

As far as time is concerned, the overall composition is simple. A seven paragraph model telling introduces Connie and her familial circumstances; it also brings the story to the plaza where we peer into the lives of Connie and her young friends.

They must have been familiar sights, walking around the shopping plaza in their shorts and flat ballerina slippers that always scuffed the sidewalk, with charm bracelets jingling on their thin wrists; they would lean together to whisper and laugh secretly if someone passed who amused or interested them.

We also meet Arnold Friend for the first time. The foreshadowing of the story’s inevitable end is showcased here with his introduction in the eighth paragraph in which he briefly taunts Connie after she notices him.

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 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. He wagged a finger and laughed and said, ‘Gonna get you, baby…’

Following Arnold’s introduction, the story moves to a brief interlude that follows Connie from her three hours with a boy, Eddie, to her ride home with her friend her friend’s father.

“They rode off with the girl’s father, sleepy and pleased… ” From there the story moves to the morning after where Connie circumvents conversation with June and her mother regarding her evening and her friends. “Next morning June asked her how the movie was and Connie said, ‘So-so.’”

“One Sunday” brings in the remainder of the story and soon Arnold Friend shows up at Connie’s house to charm her. Time is handled with ease. There is no backtracking or flashbacks. It’s pretty clear-cut from beginning to end. Succinctly, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is a chronological tale.

Point of View

The story is told from Connie’s fifteen year old perspective, although the narrative itself is a third person account, or more precisely, it is a limited third person point of view. However, Oates inserts text that, at times, is more suggestive a child’s perspective. The point of these insertions, I contend, is to indicate to the reader that Connie is straddling that difficult line between child and adult.

Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything and who hadn’t much reason any longer to look at her own face, always scolded Connie about it. [...] Connie would raise her eyebrows at these familiar old complaints and look right through her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at that moment: she knew she was pretty and that was everything.

Connie has several more instances of this childish regression as the narrative plunges forward, as her fear escalates.

‘Shut up! You’re crazy!’ Connie said. She backed away from the door. She put her hands up against her ears as if she’d heard something terrible, something not meant for her. ‘People don’t talk like that, you’re crazy,’ she muttered.’

Connie’s reaction to Arnold’s insinuations sparks a childlike gesture of covering up her ears and she even thinks that his advances are “something not meant for her.”

During the course of the story, Connie attempts to be an adult of sorts. There are even indications that perhaps the girl is slightly promiscuous, or at the very least, is no longer a virgin. It’s an odd assumption to make, I realize, and her sexual escapades are not explicitly revealed in the text, but there are indications of it. (Note: italicized words in the following passage are not the author’s, but my own.)

She spent three hours with him, at the restaurant where they ate hamburgers and drank Cokes in wax cups that were always sweating, and then down an alley a mile or so away, and when he left her off at five to eleven only the movie house was still open at the plaza. Her girl friend was there, talking with a boy. When Connie came up, the two girls smiled at each other and Connie said, ‘How was the movie?’ and the girl said, ‘You should know.’

Although it is not the most substancial evidence of promiscuity, it is slightly reinforced by the mention of the Pettinger girl who Connie’s mother does not like. Connie calls her “a dope” and the narrator adds: “She always drew thick clear lines between herself and such girls, and her mother was simple and kind enough to believe it.” Furthermore, as Connie lounges in the sun after her family has left for the barbecue, she muses on the past night’s pleasantries:

Connie sat with her eyes closed in the sun, dreaming and dazed with the warmth about her as if this were a kind of love, the caresses of love, and her 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, not the way someone like June would suppose but sweet, gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs…

Conclusively, the entirety of the story is told from Connie’s perspective and the reader never once gets a sense of Arnold Friend’s internal perception. We only get Connie’s own sense of his perception as in this instance:

Arnold Friend let go of the post tentatively and opened his arms for her, his elbows pointing in toward each other and his wrists limp, to show that this was an embarrassed embrace and a little mocking, he didn’t want to make her self-conscious.

However, even this passage of Arnold’s thoughts are made by Connie who is interpreting is his actions and movements. So, in the end, the story is all Connie’s.

Language & Execution

There is an understated achievement at work in this composition of words that warrants further investigation. As a writer you give careful consideration to the construction of sentences and to the potency of the rhythm you consciously implement. After all, that is perhaps where the real story shines through: in the language. Joyce Carol Oates’s short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is certainly no exception.

Overflowing sentences are used throughout the story. By overflowing I am referring to sentences that have contained within them full sentences separated by commas. For example:

June did this, June did that, she saved money and helped clean the house cooked and Connie couldn’t do a thing, her mind was all filled with trashy daydreams.

Now what this long overflowing sentence helps accomplish is creating a sense of that breathless youth of teenagers; their tendency to speak and think long-windedly without pause, as if their life has an immediacy that other lives may not that demands instant action and a slide toward the future. Additionally Oates does an amazing thing: she assimilates easily and fluidly to that teenaged life with her composition of words just as her villain Arnold Friend does with charisma and charm and knowledge of teenaged youth culture.

Another “overflowing sentence” I am particularly fond of serves another purpose, as it provides insight into Connie’s perception of Arnold, how she is captivated of him, yet she senses something a little off about the situation:

She recognized most things about him, the tight jeans that showed his thighs and buttocks and the greasy leather boots and the tight shirt, and even that slippery friendly smile of his, that sleepy dreamy smile that all the boys used to get across ideas they didn’t want to put into words.

This excerpt – while still capturing that breathless youth described above – also uses words that, when juxtaposed, are somewhat contrary to another. A “slippery friendly smile” sounds innocuous enough on a first read, but it’s really a rather telling observation. “Slippery” when matched with “friendly” implies an undercurrent of something sinister going on. And indeed, there is something going on beneath Arnold’s surface. What can be deduced is that Oates uses her words deliberately (as most authors tend to do.)

Personal Response

There’s something at work in the narrative that pulls me in and I suspect is has more to do with style than substance. That’s not to imply that there is no substance to the story; there most certainly is, of course. And if anything, Oates manages to blend both style and substance together, lending the reader with both a message or commentary of sorts and a striking fluid writing style.

My story had an ending one might call tragic, since the heroine surrenders to death. She in a sense is transcending her mortal self; she arises above her particularity and she’s going to ascend to death. She looks out from the screen door, and she sees the organic world, which is the world from which we come, and we’re composed of, and she’s going to go to that world and she’s going to die. A man has come for her, a rapist, and he’s going to kill her. (Oates, 2)

A most desperate and dark observation on her own work of fiction, Oates states the obvious. Her heroine dies. And although Connie is a flawed person, she ultimately achieves redemption for her wicked ways – here promiscuity, her contempt for her family – by surrendering herself to secure her family’s safety.

Also of interest to me is the Charles Manson-like charisma of Arnold Friend. I remember reading the investigative crime book Helter Skelter (that recounts the crimes and prosecution of Manson and his infamous family) three times when I was a teenager. I was eerily transfixed by how these people – who were essentially children – were implored or directed, somehow persuaded, to take the lives of others. How had they been so (seemingly) easily swayed into doing so? How did Charles Manson seduce them and how had did they fall for it? Manson has become a name synonymous with fear and murder (among other things) but as the years have passed it seems as though the question as to just how he charmed his followers is no longer asked. I suppose it’s not really important. And it’s not as if Arnold Friend is really a Manson-inspired creation. Yet, at the same rate, he is. The inspiration for Arnold, Schmid, claimed – much like Mason had – hallucinogenic or psychic powers. Arnold is beguiling and intriguing. Connie senses it. “His smile assured her that everything was fine.” He tricks her. Deceives her. Relies on his beguile and her intrigue to clinch her. Manson certainly did much the same thing. My knowledge of Manson and his “family” compels me to looks at these similarities.

And then there is the dialogue. I’ve never been a fan of dialogue. It is essential to most any story and I suppose my distaste for it comes from my own inability to compose it (although I have been pleasantly surprised to be told that my inability it actually quite able, but nonetheless I remain critical.) I would prefer to read a large block of text than an exchange of dialogue. I was painfully bored with Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Killers” because it is hardly more than a few pages of dialogue and little else. And while much can be revealed and learned through dialogue, I prefer to learn in other ways. The blocks of text are where the writer’s style shines through; the dialogue is where their character’s individuality does. In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” the dialogue – particularly Arnold’s – is precise and even haunting. From his first words “Gonna get you, baby” to his last “My sweet little blue-eyed girl” I am given a portrait of a man who is aware of his own devious intentions. Oates stunningly balances dialogue and action (or lack there of, for that matter.)

And then there is the rhythm which in many ways – and is rather appropriate given the subject and characters of the story, now that I think about it – sort of reads like lyrics to a song with its long overflowing sentences and its careful use of commas and its immediacy. I guess that’s what I like most about it. I consider myself to be a substance over style kind of girl, but when it comes to reading other authors, sometimes I can’t help enjoying the way it’s said more than what is actually being said on the page. And how appropriate that the story reads kind of like a song since it was inspired by one and also because of the several references to music, i.e. the XYZ radio show, “the singsong way [Arnold] talked,” how “He spoke in a simple lilting voice, exactly as if he were reciting the words to a song,” their discussion of Bobby King, and the realization Connie has about “the echo of a song from last year, about a girl rushing into her boy friend’s arms and coming home again.”

And that is the story of pretty fifteen year old Connie and her descent to her doom. Oates has often been asked why her writing are so violent. She responds:

When I point out that, in fact, my writing isn’t usually explicitly violent, but deals, most of the time, with the phenomenon of violence and its aftermath, in ways not unlike those of the Greek dramatists…(Oates, NY 1)

And she’s right. At least in the case of “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” The story is not macabre or grotesque and in fact, there aren’t any overt implications about what exact doom Connie will befall. She goes onto to state “writing is language and, in a very important sense, is more ‘about’ language than ‘about’ a subject.” I think she’s onto something there.

Additional Notes and Research Material.

During the course of this essay I came across several interesting articles of interest. I tried to steer clear of articles that were more critical in nature and tried to focus on those that would lend some information to the formation and execution of the narrative.
I found one rather lengthy article that detailed the life and crime and trial of the true-life inspiration for the short story, Charles Howard Schmid, Jr., or “Smitty,” on a website for Court TV. (http://www.crimelibrary.com/) I did not read it in its entirety since Joyce Carol Oates herself didn’t even finish the Life magazine article that introduced him to her, but I found some of the skimming I did to be interesting. There is more detail about those boots of his and how he stuffed them. There is also further information about the close friends who accompanied him, much like Ellie does in the story. Also located in the article are more extensive details regarding the relationships this killer had with many young girls and women.

Lastly, here’s an interesting thing I came across:
The Secret Code – “33, 19, 17″
Old Testament, counting backwards, the 33rd section is Judges. Chapter 19, verse 17:
“And the old man lifted up his eyes and saw the wayfarer in the street of the city; and the old man said to him,
Where are you going? And whence do you come?”
So I guess it is safe to assume this is where the story’s title is derived from. Interesting, no?

Works Cited
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
Oates, Joyce Carol. Lit Chat. http://www.salon.com/06/departments/litchat.html
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Why Is Your Writing So Violent?” NY Times, 1981.

http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/07/05/specials/oates-violent.html?oref=login

Ramsland, Katharine. “Charles Schmid, the Pied Piper of Tucson”, Crime Libraries Online, http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial2/schmid/index.htm
Lyrics: “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” by Bob Dylan, http://orad.dent.kyushu-u.ac.jp/dylan/itsalovr.html
For the “Secret Code” and full text of the story: http://jco.usfca.edu/