Joyce Carol Oates Story

From the start, I felt there was so much description that nothing was occurring until we meet the man in the parking lot. He automatically causes tension and suspense because Connie doesn't recognize him and the readers never hear him speak in the first encounter. The mystery of this man looms over our heads. When does he come in? Why is he there? Will she fall in love? Is he her soulmate? Oates drives us through this story with an interesting take on dialogue. The entire conversation and all of the action happens in one place at one given time. It takes up more than half of the story. They are at her house, divided by a thin screen door. The long drawn out dialogue keeps the reader attentive because the scene, the tension never pauses. It has the occasional setting and detailed break wedged in the middle of the tense scene to make the scene seem even more drawn out, even more tense.

I feel as if the tension made the story so much more enjoyable because otherwise, I would have been bored. I have discovered that short stories need a shocking occurrence or a specific event to make the story easy and fun to read. If the story starts out like a novel would, the short story would be boring and confusing none the least.

"Where are you going, Where have you been" is an odd tale that keeps me guessing especially the title. It's in the form of two questions which makes me feel as if I am in the stalker's mind thinking about this girl he just glanced at in a parking lot. I also find it intriguing that Oates does not focus on the main feature or chooses Arnold's perspective for this story. She chooses the daily life of an average teenage girl and that's why I found it a bit lacking in the beginning, but she twisted that around quickly. I cannot tell if Oates wrote this title thinking of the questions that were popping into Connie's head when she saw Arnold or the other way around. Overall, this story gave me the creeps and it definitely made me nervous for Connie because I would never want to be in this scary situation especially for a young girl. It also made me nervous because of how drawn out the one scene in the driveway/kitchen was. Oates did a fantastic job on making the reader feel tension between these two characters and throughout the entire story.