Where Are You Going Where Have You Been?
by Joyce Carol Oates(1966)
Short Storyc. 15 pages
“She looked at it for a while as if the words meant something to her that she did not yet know.”
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One great work, every day
by Joyce Carol Oates(1966)
“She looked at it for a while as if the words meant something to her that she did not yet know.”
Joyce Carol Oates(1966)
Connie, fifteen years old, meets a stranger named Arnold Friend in a parking lot, and later he appears at her house while her family is away. Joyce Carol Oates based the story on an actual serial killer; the dedication is to Bob Dylan. The story builds with slow, terrifying inevitability, its details both realistic and symbolic. Arnold Friend's name, his car, his speech, his knowledge: everything suggests something inhuman beneath the teenager's pose. The ending is withheld, which makes it worse.