Have you ever woken up from a nightmare and questioned yourself if it really happened or not? Well in Joyce Carol Oates's short story "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" a little fifteen-year-old girl, who is self indulged, leads a promiscuous kind of life and the readers don't know if it's a dream or if it's something else. Many people might argue that everything is real and nothings a dream, or that Arnold Friend is the devil, or even that it's based on Bob Dylan's song "Mr. Tambourine Man." My analysis of this story is that it is simply a dream and nothing else. There are some critics who give evidence that it is a dream and one in particular is Larry Rubin. Giving proof from the story and Larry Rubin's critical essay there are points that make me think Connie's encounter with Arnold Friend is a without a doubt a dream. .
This girl is always having trashy daydreams about the boys she has met, "but all the boys fell back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face, but an idea, a feeling, mixed up with urgent insistent pounding of the music and the humid night air of July" (704). Well obviously, these boys in her daydreams all become one person; who's not to say that it's not Arnold Friend that she "materializes" in her dreams (Rubin 730). The way he looks might signify the way her dream lover would look: "The way all of them dressed". He dressed like he is a hard working man with "tight faded jeans stuffed into black, scuffed boots, a belt that pulled his waist in and showed how lean he was, and a white pullover shirt that was a little soiled and showed the hard small muscles of his arms and shoulders". His face was familiar to her somehow, too (Oates 707). When he smiles it looks like he is inside a mask: "his whole face is a mask" (710). .
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Connie thinks she is a heroine in her dream by giving up herself to save her whole family. Arnold told her, "They don't know one thing about you and never did and honey you"re better then them because no of them would of done this for you" (713).
