Joyce Carol Oates presents a description of an adolescent girl's disaffection with her family and rape by Arnold Friend in the short story "Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?" Throughout the story the reader watches Connie, the central character, reject her family, friends and self in an attempt to deny her youth and jump to adulthood. At the climax of the story she encounters Arnold Friend, an older boy, who manipulates Connie's distorted perspective to destroy her world and rape her.
             "Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?" is told in the third person by a narrator who is heavily biased toward Connie's perspective. From the opening description of Connie's older sister as "... so plain and chunky and steady that Connie had to hear her praised all the time..." (467) the reader is presented with the narrow-minded world of a misguided adolescent. Oates uses a simplified sentence structure to further draw the reader into Connie's world. Oates then uses an almost inhumanly evil character, Arnold Friend, to destroy this environment.
             Arnold Friend first appears during one of Connie's escapes to a local diner where she has gone to meet boys. The reader is given warning of his importance through his more complete description and the ominous piece of dialogue, "Gonna get you, baby." Unlike the main character from Boyle's "Greasy Lake," Oats does not attempt to explain or justify the violence in her story. From Arnold Friend's introduction to the completion of the story his every action systematically attacks Connie. His advances begin by complementing Connie on her physical appearance. The reader is already aware that this is central to her self-image through the almost entirely physical descriptions in the first third of the story. After hooking her with a compliment, Arnold Friend announces his intentions and Connie begins to panic. From his clothes, "... which [were] the way all of them dressed..." (471) to his flamboyant ca...