The similarities aren’t clear to see in the short stories, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? and A Good Man is Hard to Find”, but if you look closely you can see multiple; one being that the main characters are both female, selfish, self-absorbed and conceited. This selfishness is shown by the grandmother; in A Good Man is Hard to Find, when she takes her cat on vacation, callously saying “because he would miss her too much and she was afraid he might brush against one of the gas burners and accidentally asphyxiate himself” (O’Connor 1097) cats are independent animals and its doubtful the cat would even know she was gone, but the reality is is that would miss the cat. Comparative to the grandmother, Connie in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” demonstrates her selfishness by snubbing her families’ barbeque “rolling her eyes to let her mother know just what she thought of it” (Oates 2129).
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The grandmother illustrates this because she knows that Bailey doesn’t want to stop anywhere but now since she thought about it, “the more she wanted to see it” (O’Connor 2118) she even goes on telling her grandkids this great story about the plantation, knowing that the kids would plead with Bailey to stop and check it out, ultimately getting what she wanted. “Her mother was so simple; Connie thought, that it was maybe cruel to fool her so much” (Oates 2128). Connie ‘fools’ her mother into thinking she’s a good girl but she really just wants to go out and meet boys at night.
Another similarity between the two stories is the point of view that the authors wrote them in, an outsider’s perspective. Although both stories are written like this they are both told through the central female lead
The grandmother illustrates this because she knows that Bailey doesn’t want to stop anywhere but now since she thought about it, “the more she wanted to see it” (O’Connor 2118) she even goes on telling her grandkids this great story about the plantation, knowing that the kids would plead with Bailey to stop and check it out, ultimately getting what she wanted. “Her mother was so simple; Connie thought, that it was maybe cruel to fool her so much” (Oates 2128). Connie ‘fools’ her mother into thinking she’s a good girl but she really just wants to go out and meet boys at night.
Another similarity between the two stories is the point of view that the authors wrote them in, an outsider’s perspective. Although both stories are written like this they are both told through the central female lead