In Joyce Carol Oats’ “Where is Here?”, a strange visitor comes to a family’s home to look through and reminisce about his childhood. Throughout the story, the stranger moves from place to place about the house, stopping and telling little details from his childhood concerning some of the rooms. Oats’ chooses to have the stranger move about the house in a certain order, as to have the desired effect on readers.Throughout the events of “Where is Here?”, this effect is achieved. The stranger first starts his tour in the garage. However, the reader does not get any details about why the stranger might be interested in the garage. He then moves to the backyard, going down to an old swing set. The reader learns that these swings were more than likely there when the stranger was a child because of the posts being rotted. Without giving the readers almost any detail about the outside of the house, the story moves on to the stranger being invited inside. Once inside the house, the stranger goes into the kitchen. He notices some things have changed since he lived in the house, but some have stayed the same. He also makes a remark about a door, asking if it leads to the basement. However the couple ignores this question and moves on. The stranger then notices some flowers on a windowsill and says his mother used to have flowers there too, although they never bloomed. He then moves to the dining room, telling about who sat where at the table. Also, the reader discovers that the couple’s children are the same age as the stranger and his sister were when they lived in this house. Next came the living room, in which the stranger pointed out that there used to be a water stain on the fireplace mantel, but the couple hadn’t seen it before. He also tells about the window seat, and how it was one of his happy places in the house whenever his father wasn’t home. He says that his mother would sit there with him as they plotted together. She would also read him stories and riddles that he could never answer. When the mother asks the stranger if his mother is still alive, he answers no and says,”We’ve all been dead—they’ve all been dead—a long time.” The story then states that the stranger seemed to limp his way up the stairs,
Knowing Our Place is and excerpt from Barbara Kingsolver’s SMALL WONDER. The excerpt is basically all about the places where her life stories and where important times in her life take place. They all end up having to take place in the wilderness in a small town, in a small house in the middle of nowhere; where she had actually grown up. She talks about how her log cabin at the end of Walker Mountain is near tobacco plants and also how it has old historic nature to it. She talks about how she loves the rain and how it sounds in her little log cabin house that was built in the early 1900’s. She grew up and spent most her childhood in these woods filled with neighbor’s miles away and
Joyce Carol Oates has captivated the imagination of the reader within her short story The Abduction. There are many components to making a story great as well, and in his Ted Talk “The Clues to a Great Story”, Andrew Stanton goes into detail about the dos and don’ts of story. Joyce Carol Oates uses several of the positive references from Stanton’s Ted Talk throughout her short story to grab the reader’s attention and envelope them into the story of a girl gone missing.
Joyce Carol Oates's short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” was written in 1966 and twenty years later was made into a movie entitled Smooth Talk by Joyce Chopra, winner of the 1985 U.S. Film Festival for best dramatic picture. The writing by Oates is loosely based on a true story known as “The Pied Piper of Tucson.” The most significant differences based on the story and movie are the father-daughter relationship with Connie and Chopra’s changing the mother’s attitude toward her. Even with these changes, however, the character of Connie and her creepy stalker Arnold Friend remain the same.
The short story “Where is Here” by Joyce Carol Oats introduces us to a very complex character, labeled the stranger. The author uses the method of indirect characterization, which results in the reader making their own assumptions of the character. Indirect characterization includes some of the following: stranger’s appearance, speech, actions, private thoughts, as well as the reactions of others. The previously stated categories are the things we will analyze and draw conclusions from.
In the short story “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, there is a great deal of literary elements used to enhance the story. For example, imagery is used to draw the reader 's attention further into the story by having them see it happening in their head and allegory is used to pull the reader away from the story by referencing things that happened somewhere else. While these two literary elements are both used to magnify different parts of the story, as well as counterbalance each other, the literary device that this essay will be focused on is symbolism. While it appears in many parts of the story one of the most obvious uses of
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been is a short story originally written by Joyce Carol Oates. It was first published in 1996 and immediately faced sufficient criticism and public discussions. This story involves both surreal myth and deep psychological realism which obviously distinguish this writing among other works of the author. In the center of the narration is a young girl named Connie. She is fifteen years old and is experiencing quite a turbulent period of her life. Her mother constantly compares her to her older sister and this factor only intensifies Connie's feeling that her mother does not understand her. In the story, the world of Connie is quite contradictory as well as her character itself. Nevertheless, it remains interesting to explore until the very last page of Oates' writing.
The antagonist of “Where are you going, Where have you been” written by Joyce Carol Oates, is no ordinary guy. Arnold Friends,a dynamic, round character with a charming but controlling personality, seems to be the embodiment of Atropos. A greek deity known as the moirai who is said to be the controller of fate, or specifically, one’s death. He talks a lot but reveal nothing about himself, a sign of emotionally manipulative person, someone who is able to zero in on one’s weakness, like Connie’s romantic fantasies.) Like the typical bad boy archetype he offered to take her away from the dull drone of her suburban life. But that explain how it links to arnold being atropos lmao/how death takes you away. With the quality of a calm and deep, sing-song
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates is based on a real-life event of Charles Schmid Jr. and the murder of multiple girls. The short story is designed around this historical event and has several key points that are comparable to both the story and the event. This story starts with a girl Connie who, like any typical teenager, is very flirtatious with a lot of guys; one person, in particular, Arnold Friend, is portrayed as a cougar. He shows up to Connie’s place, takes her somewhere and what's left is an inferred cliffhanger. The short story gives a more effective ending as it leaves the reader in a state of deep and complex thought in relations to the sudden and abrupt ending. Threats such as burning Connie’s house down, stopping her heart, and “going for a ride” are red flags that hint at Connie’s near future.
Religion is a big influence in Flannery O 'Connor 's writing. “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” stresses the idea of good and evil. This can also be viewed at the evil in Christ. The story is set in the early 1900s. “The Life You Save May Be Your Own” begins with a woman and her disabled daughter sitting on their porch and she notices a man walking towards their home. The man, Mr. Shiftlet, sees an old car that he wants. The old woman, Lucynell, is also craving something and takes the opportunity to achieve it. By her use of symbols, imagery, and irony, she reveals that there is corruption within Christ.
The story, “The Landlady” by Roald Dahl, takes place in Bath, United Kingdom. In this Mystery, the main character, Billy Weaver finds an interesting lodging that might just change his life forever. Being too trusting is a great quality to have, but when Billy is a seventeen year old who is in a new place, trusting might not cut it. Roald Dahl creates the theme ‘Be cautious of the reader’s surroundings’ by using Foreshadowing and Imagery.
The story has two main settings. First, the family’s house symbolizes union but not quite right. The family was tired of the grandmother. There was an atmosphere of oppression and manipulation by the grandmother. For example, from the beginning of the story the author stated, “You all ought to take them somewhere else for a change so they would see different parts of the world and be broad” (O’Connor 485). The grandmother uses this setting to suggest that the grandmother is very demanding. Finally, into the wood O’Connor uses the setting of tall, dark and deep wood to represent something that is difficult to deal with. O’Connor also mentions that “Behind them the line of woods gaped like dark” (490). It explores the dark consequences of death, where the family encounter strangers in the wood and we only learn what’s happening from the noise people make, gunshots and screams. The setting in this story is very good which states expression of mood and it helps us to know the meaning of the
In one's life, for many, the place means everything. In the novel Blank by Trina St Jean, a young teen looses her memory after an upsetting accident and spends the novel trying to figure out what happened. Jessica's life is set in her family farm and surrounding forest. Setting is crucial to her story because of her love for nature, her accident, and her runaway plan. To begin, Jessica’s family farm is the perfect place for a nature lover like Jessica, it could be that living on the farm made her develop her love, or that is grew over time. Nonetheless, the farm is a crucial setting to the story: “After taking the first photo it starts to come back to me. Not a memory, but a feeling. Like I’ve done this before” (St. Jean 189). Here it is seen
A review of the house itself suggests that an architectural hierarchy of privacy increases level by level. At first, the house seems to foster romantic sensibilities; intrigued by its architectural connotations, the narrator embarks upon its description immediately--it is the house that she wants to "talk about" (Gilman 11). Together with its landscape, the house is a "most beautiful place" that stands "quite alone . . . well back from the road, quite three miles from the village" (Gilman 11). The estate's grounds, moreover, consist of "hedges and walls and gates that lock" (Gilman 11). As such, the house and its grounds are markedly depicted as mechanisms of confinement--ancestral places situated within a legacy of control and
“The Little Stranger” is a 2009 gothic novel written by Sarah Waters. It is a ghost story set in a dilapidated mansion in Warwickshire, England in the 1940s. This novel features a male narrator, a country doctor who makes friends with a family with faded fortunes left simply with a very old estate that is crumbling around them. The stress of reconciling the state of their finances with the familial responsibility of keeping the estate coincides with perplexing events which may or may not be of supernatural origin, culminating in tragedy.
Margaret Atwood creates a haunting and beautiful piece describing the experience a sad child goes through. She structures her poem by using five stanzas; two stanzas consisting of five lines, then one stanza with ten lines, and ending with two stanzas consisting of five lines. She uses simple yet powerful diction, tone, metaphors, similes, symbolism, and imagery to show the unknown speaker giving advice to a sad child. Her message/theme is sadness is a part of life and there are different ways to deal with it, but when death comes the thing that one is being sad about doesn’t matter.