Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Genre 1 key example

The social realism comes across in the fact that Connie spends time the way that a typical suburban teenager in the 1960s would—she goes to the mall, watches movies at a drive-in theater, and listens to rock music on the radio. The psychological realism comes through via the narrator’s close attention to the ways that Arnold is able to gaslight and manipulate Connie into driving away with him, despite the fact that he clearly wants to do her harm.

The supernatural element in the story is Arnold. While, on the surface, he comes across as a typical coercive abuser, he also seems to possess mystical or magical abilities. This comes through in the following passage, as he tells Connie exactly what her family is doing in that moment (at a barbecue in another neighborhood):

“Right now they're uh—they're drinking. Sitting around," he said vaguely, squinting as if he were staring all the way to town and over to Aunt Tillie's back yard. Then the vision seemed to get clear and he nodded energetically. "Yeah. Sitting around. There's your sister in a blue dress, huh? And high heels, the poor sad bitch—nothing like you, sweetheart! And your mother's helping some fat woman with the corn, they're cleaning the corn—husking the corn—"

Cite this Quote

Here Arnold squints “as if he were staring all the way to town and over to Aunt Tillie's back yard” and shares details about Connie’s family that he couldn’t possibly know, such as the fact that they are “drinking,” “sitting around,” and “husking the corn,” and that June (Connie’s sister) is wearing a blue dress and high heels. The narrator refers to this as a “vision” that Arnold seems to have, which implies some sort of supernatural abilities on Arnold’s part. For this reason, some scholars read Arnold as a symbol for the Devil or evil more broadly.