Missing the Exit

In Joyce Carol Oates’s story, “Where are you going, Where have you been?”, the main character Connie faces a dilemma when she must choose between separating herself from her family remaining close to her most familiar environment. Connie wants to differentiate herself from the ways of her family and become her own individual, but in order to change she has to distance her family environment and her home. In the story, we find Connie struggling to maintain a position in between these two paths. We find her trying to neither forsake her roots and become independent or acknowledge her connection to her family. She must decide whether to break away from tradition and lead a free life or become part of the community and familial infrastructure that raised her.

This dilemma begins with the impossibility to completely reconcile these two paths. To choose a radical, individual life that is not “sanctioned” by the family is to seem ungrateful for the sacrifices that the family has made to raise you in one set of ways. It seems as if you were slandering the way of life of the family and stabbing those responsible for the continuation of that way of life right in the back. If you do not necessarily agree with the family customs, choosing to become a part of the family lifestyle can mean stabbing yourself in the back.

Connie struggles with this dilemma, but is indecisive until the presence of Arnold Friend (devil, dream, stalker or whatever he is) forces her down one path. Connie wants the support system of her home and friends and her conventional life, but she does not want to participate in family activities and makes no attempt to reconcile her differences with those of her family. For example, she makes no attempt to acknowledge her relationship with her sister or mother. She tends toward the path of independence but is too immature to make a commitment to this way of life and instead remains in limbo for too long. In this way, Oates shows hoe independence without the necessary maturity is a bad situation and that the decision to become independent should only be made when one is mature enough to understand the sacrifices of such a choice.

Arnold Friend represents a situation that forces her to choose a path. In this case, she is so far “behind the eight ball” that she can only go down one path. She has lost the power of choice because she has delayed too long and “flirted” with the idea of independence without serious consideration. She has lost her free will because she has denied her family for too long without acknowledging her commitment to the independent path. Arnold Friend is the last resort, and as he puts it where Connie wants to go now has been "cancelled out" and is no longer an option. To abandon the formal altogether, it’s like waiting too long to decide whether or not to get off the freeway. She has tended to continue down the path of independence. She has stayed too long in the right lane. If you miss the exit at first, you can still go across the gore point but this is a difficult thing to do without risking terrible consequences. Perhaps you hit the barrier and lose everything on both paths. If you stall even further, you cannot cross onto the exit without slamming into the concrete wall and dying a horrible death. At this point, you have no reasonable choice but to stay on your given path. Connie has waited too long and passed the gore point. She has no choice but to continue on the path to independent rebellion and follow Arnold Friend. Her indecision ends up making the choice for her.(635)