Where Are You Going, where Have you Been?

"My sweet little blue-eyed girl," he said, in a half sung sigh that had nothing to do with her brown eyes but was taken up just the same by the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him, so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it."

This paper will show that Connie develops from a superficial and dreamy teenage- girl into a more rational woman. The first paragraphs will deal with Connie's life as the young careless teenager. Her behavior and attitudes towards her family and with her peers will be looked at. The actual encounter with Arnold Friend will be examined in the succeeding sections.

According to Christiana Marsden Gillis the:

" very title of the story calls attention to duality: A future (Where Are You Going) and the past (Where Have You Been). The tale catches its main character at a passage point where, it is implied, the future may depend preci

. . .

However Connie's main ambition is to have fun, to be popular and not to be like her dull obedient sister June. June is more likely to stick to their mother and can become an instrument for her to judge Connie and put pressure on her. He does not actually explain what those signs stand for but he makes her laugh about it. "

Connie's past can clearly be considered as childishly selfish and self-centered.

It strikes her how she has been fooled by his dressing and acting like a teenager. She therefore shows, assumingly for the first time in her life, that she can take responsibility and behave like a grown-up. Her curiosity about them is demonstrated by her questions about the golden writing on the car. "

The description of the restaurant can be understood as an allusion to a phallic symbol. In addition the

"revolving Figure of a grinning boy"

underlines a male dominance in this picture. From her point of view they are probably as vulnerable and as weak as she is. He wakes her up from her trashy dreams which consist of that romantic world which is created in her favorite pop songs.

In the text it says:

"Like a place she had never seen before, some room she had run inside but that wasn't good enough, wasn't going to help her. Her greatest challenge in life is to escape parental supervision long enough to sneak across the highway from the mall, where she is supposed to be seeing a movie with a friend, to the forbidden zone.

On the other hand her sister June is not pretty.

Common topics in this essay:
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Approximate Word count = 1987
Approximate Pages = 8 (250 words per page double spaced)

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