Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Summary & Analysis

Beginning

Connie is fifteen and intensely aware of her own prettiness. Her mother criticises her constantly; her older sister June is practical and responsible where Connie is dreamy and vain. Connie's summer life divides into two modes: the domestic life at home and the social life she lives at the shopping plaza and the drive-in, where she and her friends meet older boys. She lies about where she goes. At the drive-in, she briefly notices a strange boy in a gold car who looks at her and says he will have her.

Rising action

On a Sunday when her family goes to a barbecue without her, Connie is home alone. A gold car pulls into the driveway. Arnold Friend gets out: a man in his thirties performing teenage style — tight jeans, cowboy boots, Ray-Ban sunglasses. He knows her name. He knows the names of her family members. He can apparently tell what is happening at the barbecue they have driven to. He says he has come to take her for a ride. His companion, Ellie Oscar, stays in the car listening to music on a transistor radio.

Climax

Connie realises something is wrong with Arnold Friend's body — his boots seem stuffed, his legs seem unsteady. His makeup is wrong. He is not a teenage boy. He tells her exactly what will happen: she will come with him, her family will be safe if she does, her family will not be safe if she does not. He threatens without quite saying what the threat is. Connie tries to call the police but her body won't cooperate; she cannot function. He tells her exactly how to unlock the screen door from inside.

Ending

Connie opens the door and goes to him. The story ends as she crosses the threshold. Oates does not describe what happens next. The final images are of Connie moving toward the car, with a sense of the vast land opening around her and the world she knew receding. The ending is not redemptive — Connie goes because she has no choice — but Oates frames it with a strange, almost mythological quality.

Connie

Connie is sympathetically observed but not idealised. Her vanity, her lying, her contempt for her family — Oates presents these as the ordinary faults of an ordinary teenager, not as signs of moral failure. What makes the story disturbing is the disproportion between these ordinary faults and the punishment the story subjects her to. Connie's sexuality — her awareness of herself as attractive to men — is treated as a fact, not a crime. The story refuses to suggest she has brought this on herself.

Arnold Friend

Arnold Friend's name, critics have noted, is an anagram of 'an old fiend' — one of the story's signals that he is not only a realistic character. His disguise as a teenager is flawed: he is too old, his costume does not quite fit, he knows too much. Readings of him include the realistic (a serial killer modelled on Charles Schmid), the symbolic (Death as a suitor, in the tradition of European folklore), and the religious (a demonic figure). Oates allows all these to coexist, which is why the story has generated so much critical attention.

Coming-of-age and the loss of safety

The story is fundamentally about the moment when a girl discovers the world is dangerous in a way she was not prepared for. Connie's world — the plaza, the music, the boys — was already a practice world for adult sexuality, but on her terms. Arnold Friend removes those terms entirely. The transition the story describes is not into adulthood but into a recognition that her own desires have made her visible to something she cannot control. This connects it thematically to A Good Man Is Hard to Find, where ordinary complacency collides with unexpected violence.

Music, identity, and the 1960s

Oates dedicated the story to Bob Dylan. Music runs through the story as a marker of Connie's identity and world: the songs on the radio, the transistor Ellie holds in the car. Arnold Friend invokes the same musical culture to establish intimacy. The story is partly about how the liberatory culture of the 1960s — youth, music, sexual freedom — coexisted with violence against girls.

Arnold Friend as archetype

The most persistent reading of Arnold Friend sees him as a figure from folklore: Death come to claim Connie in the guise of a lover, as in the European ballad tradition. His strange knowledge (he knows where her family is), his disguise (the wrong-sized body in teenage costume), his insistence that she come willingly — all support this reading. The story's ambiguity about whether he is a human criminal or something else is deliberate: Oates makes him disturbing enough to carry both readings simultaneously.