Summary Of 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'

In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” Joyce Oates shows how Connie’s drive for boys turns into Connie’s worst nightmare when one shows up at her house, Arnold Friend, threatening to do harm to her and her family if she doesn’t do what she’s told. When Connie doesn’t do what she’s told, however, Arnold threatens to kill her family and kidnap Connie. For example, the theme of a worst nightmare coming true is seen throughout many stories, like Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None. Just as “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” leads to a sense of suspense, so does And Then There Were None. In both stories, they both leave you with what happened, and you don’t find out until the very end. Even then it may be a guessing game to find out what really happened.
However, in And Then There Were None, a person, U.N. Owen, invited ten people to an abandoned island. One by one everyone started dying. Up until the end did we know that the real killer was Justice Wargrave. Justice killed everyone including himself. While over 60 years separate these two novels, they both have a common theme, suspense. In …show more content…
One of them being the setting. In And Then There Were None, Ms. Christie’s setting is an old abandoned island in the middle of nowhere. Miss. Christie wanted her setting to be remote. Having the setting remote like that adds more suspicion and more of a mysterious effect. If Ms. Christie had her setting in a downtown city in a high rise apartment building, it wouldn’t have added anything to her story, maybe have taken something away. When Ms. Oates writes her story, she puts it in a urban and rural setting. At the beginning of the story, Ms. Oates has Connie go into town, that’s where Connie saw Arnold. Connie lives in a rural area. If Ms. Oates had her setting in a different area, it wouldn’t have made much sense. Having the setting in a rural area adds suspense to the