In her story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been, Joyce Carol Oates presents us with a well-known maxim: children can't wait to get old. Tired of her boring and helpless childhood, Connie, the protagonist, 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: growth. Connie, a stereotypical fifteen-year-old, views her life and her family with dissatisfaction. Jealous towards her twenty-four-year-old sister June, despite June's outward simplicity, and tense towards her annoying mother, Connie runs away to the mall with her friends. She and her clique of friends feel ownership of the place and the rest of the world: "Everything about her had two sides, one for home and one for anywhere that wasn't home..." (1-2). The sense of freedom intoxicates them. Sometimes they cross the street to get to a drive-in restaurant. Moving from one world to another, they abandon the well-known structure of the shopping mall and adopt the territory of the older kids. They ascended through the maze of parked and moving cars to the brightly lit, fly-infested restaurant, their faces pleased and expectant, as if entering a sacred edifice that loomed in the night to give them the refuge and blessing they longed for. (2). Here they free themselves from middle, family and school problems and bask in the glory of adolescence, drinking from the Holy Grail of freedom. Here, listening to "the music that made everything so beautiful" (2), they finally savor the maturity they longed for. But growth often comes too quickly. A boy, Eddie, will soon arrive... middle of paper... ate. As the last lines of the story suggest, despite the terror throughout the piece, she is finally forced to accept her future: “...the vast sunny expanses of the land behind him and on all his sides - so much land that Connie couldn't had never seen her before and did not recognize her except to know that she was going there” (9). After spending so much time acting like an adult than she actually was, she must now face the truth of growing up, despite her trepidation, 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 truly entails. Arnold Friend represents the stark reality that many children ignore as they gaze into the unknown, distant darkness of adulthood and growing up. In essence, this story serves as a warning: "be careful what you wish for" and "life is not all it's cracked up to be".”.