Foreshadowing the Shadows of Connie's Life

For this blog post, I wanted to talk about the story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”. This story contains a much darker-tone and somber plot progression, as this mysterious man named Arnold consistently freaks out Connie more and more as the story moves along. For this post, I wanted to concentrate on the flashy gold car, and how it is a symbol of Arnold himself.

For starters, this gold car is extremely over-the-top looking, and gives Connie some warning signals that there maybe some mysterious danger surrounding Arnold. She said that the color of the car blinds her and makes her eyes hurt, maybe a correlation to how Arnold makes her feel dizzy and uncomfortable. Another characteristic of the car that relates to Arnold himself is that the car is kind of old and outdated with the slogans/sayings written on the sides. For example, the phrase “Man the Flying Saucers” is on the front fender, which was a saying her friends used to say, but has become “old” as society would put it. To me this relates to how Arnold is probably much older than Connie, even though he wouldn’t say his real age. Arnold refers to the car as a way of transportation for Connie to enter her new post-abduction life, whatever that may entail. This makes the car and everything about it, gain a negative aura, and make it a symbol for everything that is bad about Arnold.

I think Connie should’ve known from the beginning, once she saw the gold car, that this was extremely bad news. What really hurt Connie and made her get into the mess she did, was the fact that she was too nice. I know she didn’t show interest in Arnold, or lead him on in anyway, but she could have just ran away, notified the police or someone, and avoided her problems. Maybe this was a classic ironic example of the “nice guys always finish last” mantra used by the author, Joyce Carol Oates.

I’ve noticed that a lot of the stories we read, although always involve our themes of Lust, the Gaze, Beauty, etc., also feature a nice satirical commentary about an aspect of society. Whether it was the story about Communist China, or in Barbie-Q, where it is shown how people in our society crave unnecessary material possession, it seems most of our stories focus on another sub-lying theme of society, but I heavily digress. I just wanted to talk about the car in this story, and how re-reading the story let me see how the car gave foreshadowing clues to the fact that Arnold was bad news. Also the fact that Connie could’ve just ignored the creepy man, or tried to escape her doom. However, instead we are just left with the definition of an open ending, where we have no idea what happens to Connie, or what is to become of her “new life”.