The Wishes And Dreams Our Hearts Make In Oates's "Where Are You ...

• 1  Richard Abcarian and Marvin Klotz, Literature: Reading and Writing the Human Experience, 7th Editi (...)
• 2  Students focus, of course, on the matter of whether Arnold Friend steals off with and murders Conn (...)

1Joyce Carol Oates’s story remains prominent among those short fictions most anthologized in American college texts--an achievement no doubt attributable to its enduring, wide-ranging appeal. Aside from having been made into Tom Cole’s screenplay and Joyce Chopra’s much-admired film SmoothTalk, the twice-award winning story has recently become the subject of a well-resourced casebook edited by Elaine Showalter; and it remains a fixture, even featured, in such first-line texts as Abcarian and Klotz’s Literature; Barnet, Berman, Burto, and Cain’s re-edition of Literature; Hans P. Guth and Gabriele L. Rico’s DiscoveringLiterature; Lee Jacobus’s Literature; Kirzner and Mandell’s Literature, where it is featured in a “Fiction Casebook”; and Ann Charters’ The Story and Its Writer as well as her (and Samuel Charters’) Literature and Its Writers. In the last regard it is also a staple in short fiction anthologies such as Bohner and Dougherty’s Short Fiction and Pickering’s Fiction 1001. Although highly regarded as a poet, essayist, novelist, playwright, and short fiction writer, Oates is best known to the general public as the author of “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Consequently, although its first-time readers, typically college freshmen students, have been guided throughthe story’s seemingly inexhaustible trove of suggestive meanings, its idiosyncratic styling weaves, within its varied richness, a pattern worth studying that brings together distinctive elements of theme, characterization, structure, imagery, and perspective in a format well ingrained in the American popular imagination. This pattern, although I have taught several different approaches to the story over the years, invokes something like a community of assent in young readers, who dispute far more among other interpretations.2