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Critical Analysis Of Joyce Carol Oates Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

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When it comes to literature, the culmination of narratives and fantasy stories often leads to a happy ending. However, when stories are based on a real life situation, the end of the story can result quite troubling and for some readers even discouraging. In one of the episodes from the tv series Criminal Minds one of the characters once mentioned, “I know what the world can do to a girl who only sees beauty in it.” Behind these lines there is real life significance. In this critical analysis, a short story, Where are you going, Where have you been? Joyce Carol Oates infuses a setting and imagery and allegory to convey her message of real life’s situation of a teenager’s loss of innocence, rape and murder.
In her short story, the author took …show more content…
The author’s main theme is the is tale of rape and murder with a plot carefully controlled to create suspense, by employing different types of literary devices such as figurative and symbolic language to tell the story of a it is an allegory of lost innocence, the screen door symbolizing the fragile threshold between childhood dreams and adult experience, between romantic illusions of love and the brutal reality of adult sexuality. On a still deeper symbolic level, Connie, the protagonist of the story, represents the vulnerability and naivetés of a typical teenage …show more content…
The main idea of the story is to create conscience that being all crazy about boys and trusting people who may seem to be nice at first, can bring serious consequences, sometimes fatal. She never got to see her family again. At the end of the story, the reader is left out with many doubts and suspense about what would have been Connie’s fate, did she get raped? Did she get murdered by a serial predator?
In where are you going, where have you been? Joyce Carol Oates employs figurative language, symbolism to say that to create conscience that being all crazy about boys and trusting people who may seem to be nice at first, can bring serious consequences, sometimes

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