In her short story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been, Joyce Carol Oates introduces us to a well-known maxim: children can't wait to grow old. Tired of her boring and helpless childhood, Connie, the main character, seeks cheap thrills that she compares to adulthood. Thus, Connie's surreal experience (the sudden and unwanted appearance of Arnold Friend in her car) represents a repressed fear of the inevitable and the unknown – growing up. Connie, a stereotypical fifteen-year-old girl, views her life and her family with dissatisfaction. Jealous of her twenty-four-year-old sister, June, despite June's outward simplicity, and tense toward her annoying mother, Connie runs away to the mall with her friends. She and her clique of friends feel like they own the place and the rest of the world: "Everything about her had two sides, one for the house and one for everything that wasn't home..." (1- 2). The feeling of freedom intoxicates them. Sometimes they sneak across the street to a drive-in restaurant. Crossing from one world to another, they leave the well-known layout of the shopping center and adopt the territory of the biggest. They walked back through the maze of parked and cruising cars to the brightly lit, fly-infested restaurant, their faces happy and eager, as if they were entering a sacred building that rose out of the night to offer them refuge and safety. blessing to which they aspired (2). Here, they shake off average family and school problems and bask in the glory of adolescence, drinking in their holy grail of freedom. Here, by listening to “the music that made everything so good” (2), they finally taste the maturity to which they aspire. But growing up often comes too quickly. One boy, Eddie, quickly stopped...... middle of paper ...... eaten. As the story's final lines suggest, despite the terror she feels across the room, she is ultimately forced to accept her future: "...the vast sunlit expanses of the earth behind him and on all sides of him - so much land that Connie never had. seen it before and did not recognize it except to know that she was going there” (9). After spending so much time acting like an adult than she actually was, she now has to face the truth of growing up, despite her apprehension, like all children. With complex themes and multifaceted symbols, Oates presents a girl so eager to grow up, but not yet ready to face what that actually entails. Arnold Friend represents the simple reality that many children ignore as they look into the distant unknown of adulthood and growing up. Essentially, this story acts as a way to warn "be careful what you wish for" and "life is not all it's cracked up to be ».”.