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Definition of Setting
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or it can be an imagined... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the city of New York, or... read full definition
Setting is where and when a story or scene takes place. The where can be a real place like the... read full definition
Setting
Explanation and Analysis:
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is set in an unnamed suburb in the United States in the mid-1960s. The following passage from early in the story captures two important aspects of the setting of this story—suburban mall culture and the ubiquity of pop music:
They went up through the maze of parked and cruising cars to the bright-lit, fly-infested restaurant, their faces pleased and expectant as if they were entering a sacred building that loomed up out of the night to give them what haven and blessing they yearned for. They sat at the counter and crossed their legs at the ankles, their thin shoulders rigid with excitement, and listened to the music that made everything so good: the music was always in the background, like music at a church service; it was something to depend upon.
The “they” in this passage refers to the 15-year-old Connie and her friends who are taking a trip to the “shopping plaza” in their town. As the narrator implies, suburban teenagers spent a lot of their time at the mall in the mid-1960s, navigating “the maze of parked cars” and “bright-lit, fly-infested restaurant[s].” Just as mall culture was starting to become popular with teenagers in the 1960s, so were new types of music, such as the Beatles, Rolling Stones, and Bob Dylan (the latter of whom Oates dedicated this story to). As the narrator notes here, “the music was always in the background, like music at a church service.”
It is notable that Connie’s family is nonreligious in this story and that Oates describes music as being like that of a church service and the mall as a “sacred building.” All of these choices convey to readers that many suburban teenagers (like Connie) became members of a new “religion” centered on youth culture.
It is also worth noting here that, while Connie moves around a lot at the beginning of the story, most of it takes place at her family home while her family is away at a barbecue. Isolated from her friends and her family, she is an easy victim for Arnold Friend, who, in the end, manipulates her into leaving her safe haven and coming with him in his car.
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