Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, Oates uses ambiguity and obfuscation to create an overpowering sense of dread and confusion that lingers long after a first reading. As a result, few analyses agree on various elements of the text, especially regarding the true nature of Connie’s fate at the hands of the enigmatic Arnold Friend. However, the text’s overall meaning is made up from subtle techniques that come together in Oates’s storytelling. 

Oates first sets the story’s tone and central tension immediately in the title. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is a question that parents normally ask of their children when they leave the house or come home at the end of the day. However, this kind of oversight is entirely absent from Connie’s environment. In the title, Oates alludes to Connie’s dysfunctional home-life, underscoring the dangerous freedom afforded to her by her parents. Connie’s feelings about her family are easy to miss. However, in the context of Connie’s risk-taking escapades out with friends and her eventual self-sacrifice at the hands of Arnold Friend, they comprise the basis of her journey from the foibles of her youth to the final stroke of selfless maturity and humanity in the story’s last moments.

Throughout the text, her parents are either absent, as in the case of her father, or antagonizing in the case of her mother: “Their father was away at work most of the time and when he came home, he [...] didn’t bother talking much to them, but [...] Connie’s mother kept picking at her until Connie wished her mother was dead and she herself was dead and it was all over” (250). Connie’s mother is a constant and negative influence on Connie, inflicting her daughter with a sense of inferiority. Early in the story, Connie’s mother asks “Who are you? You think you’re so pretty” (249). The question of Connie’s identity proves to be central to her arc as a character. As Connie rejects her mother and sister as fitting role models, she turns to the high romance of popular music: “Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home” (250).

Connie’s pursuit of these romantic encounters leads her to engage in frequently perilous situations—at the hands of Arnold but, more often, as a result of her own self-inflicted instances of reckless behavior and endangerment. To reach the drive-in restaurant where she goes to meet boys, she and her best friend Betty must first run across a highway. Once at the drive-in, Connie leaves her friend for three hours, worrying vaguely about Betty before leaving with Eddie for the remainder of the night. 

The drive-in restaurant itself is layered with deep foreshadowing of the drama to come in Connie’s life and the themes that underpin the narrative. Most distinct about the drive-in restaurant is its strange shape: “The restaurant was shaped like a big bottle, though squatter than a real bottle, and on its cap was a revolving figure of a grinning boy holding a hamburger aloft” (250). The drive-in is framed as a kind of church for Connie and her friends, where the “constant music” is a pleasing and comforting refuge from the world beyond it.

Connie’s crossing of the highway is also symbolic. Historically, such crossings in literature are considered a part of the monomyth, a hero’s journey in which a character crosses a body of water to attain the glory of combat, retrieve a treasure, or answer some other call that will lead to their acceptance and maturity. Here, the highway they run across serves as a threshold between her life as a young woman and a fantasy life, wherein Connie acts out or role-plays more mature behaviors propagated in the movies and music she enjoys. Ultimately, Connie’s crossing fulfils her quest to forge a strong identity for herself and leads her into the danger of Arnold Friend.

The arrival of Ellie and Arnold Friend marks the story’s rising tension and peak climax. As Oates shifts from the relative realism of earlier passages to disorienting details, impossible descriptions, and terrifying insinuations, she engages in free indirect discourse—a literary technique of modernist literature that abandons formal qualities of third person point of view in favor of a closer and more impressionistic account of events.

While the story’s unstable ending is designed to allow for a multitude of interpretations, it is useful to consider Oates’ original title, “Death And The Maiden,” referring to the medieval allegory in which scenes of beautiful maidens are depicted at the mercy of a skeletal embodiment of death or grim reaper. By referencing this imagery and its insinuating themes, Oates engages directly with Connie’s youthful vanity, pride, and dissociative conceptions of high romance. Such a reading casts Arnold Friend not merely as a psychopathic killer but as a psychopomp, a guide in the land of the dead. He leading Connie into the humility of death, and in the story’s final images, a verdant afterlife. And yet, Connie’s demise is not without dignity. When Connie decides to go out to Arnold Friend, it is not a submission but a heroic self-sacrifice to prevent him from harming Connie’s family. Connie completes her journey to experience, although she suffers a tragic fall in doing so.