The Presence of Evil Theme Analysis

In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” fifteen-year-old girl Connie is confronted—and it’s implied, raped and killed—by a sinister stranger named Arnold Friend. As the story unfolds, Friend manipulates and terrorizes Connie to such an extent that he becomes an embodiment of evil. In fact, the story goes so far as to suggest that Friend might be a personification of death, or even the devil himself—the very picture of violence, danger, and cruelty. This, combined with the story’s biblical allusions and moments of religious imagery, allows Oates to explore the nature of good and evil in the context of everyday life. The story particularly wrings fear and tension from its assertion that evil and death exist—or can infiltrate—anywhere.

Oates establishes the ordinariness of Connie’s life to suggest that her eventual, terrifying confrontation with Friend could happen to anyone. The story begins with the simple declaration, “Her name was Connie,” before diving into the details of Connie’s family and home. These include her tensions with her mother and elder sister, June, as well as the comparative absenteeism of her father, who is more concerned with his work than the squabbles of teenaged girls. Oates also informs the reader that Connie likes hanging out with friends and meeting boys. None of these details are particularly strange, and instead paint a picture of Connie as a perfectly normal fifteen-year-old girl.

The day that Friend comes to Connie’s house, her family is away at a barbecue that Connie hadn’t wanted to join. Though Connie is alone, a suburban home in the middle of the day is hardly the typical setting for a horror story—making Friend’s sinister presence all the more chilling and suggesting that the safety implied by “home” is in reality nothing more than an illusion, knocked aside as easily as the screen door Friend threatens to open if Connie doesn’t do as he says.

Of course, at first, Friend also seems like an ordinary, if odd, man. Yet he quickly becomes distinctly incongruous with the quiet suburban world in which he abducts Connie. As his conversation with Connie unfolds, he comes across as manipulative, sadistic, and threatening—in short, as pure evil.

Friend easily manipulates Connie, handily deducing her desires for romance and turning them against her. He makes her promises, but they are to break into her house if she disobeys him; he speaks in a sweet, lilting tone as he talks of graphic sexual violence and harming Connie’s family; his name is “Friend,” yet he is anything but that.

Friend clearly takes pleasure in perverting the quiet, normal world and values that surround Connie—that is, in robbing her of any sense of comfort or security. That he appears in an almost parodical form of a man—he wears mask-like makeup and wobbles across Connie’s porch in shoes stuffed to appear taller—makes this all the more disturbing, as if he is perverting not simply the world Connie holds dear, but humanity itself.

Even though Connie and her family are distinctly not religious, religious symbolism appears throughout the story—further creating the sense that, however normal she may be, Connie’s fate is tied to broader, near-mystical battles between good and evil. For example, Connie and her friends view listening to music as a kind of “church service.” Meanwhile, none of Connie’s family members “bothered with church”—a fact that contributes to Connie to being at home on the Sunday that Friend arrives.

The numbers written on the side of Friend’s car—33, 19, and 17—have distinct biblical undertones. Judges is the 33rd book of the Bible if counting backwards from Revelation, and verse 19:17 reads, “When he looked and saw the traveler in the city square, the old man asked, ‘Where are you going? Where did you come from?’” This clearly evokes the story’s title, suggesting perhaps that Friend does not belong in this world at all. Connie also repeatedly says “Christ” when flustered by Friend’s presence, creating a subtle invocation of good in contrast to the evil presented by Friend.

Through all these details, Oates imbues her tale with a sense of grand, inescapable evil that belies its suburban setting. The insidiousness nature of such evil is further bolstered by the fact that Arnold Friend was based on a real-life serial killer Charles Schmid, a.k.a. “The Pied Piper of Tucson,” who murdered three teenage girls and buried them in the desert in the early 1960s. Like Friend, Schmid wore makeup, stuffed his shoes to seem taller, and had striking (dyed) black hair; more sinisterly, he was described as particularly charismatic, and lured his victims through the use of his car, parties, and gifts. Schmid and Friend reveal how evil can exist anywhere, and that even the innocent are not safe from its reach.