Arnold Friend

Connie. He says, "I know who you were with last night, and your best girlfriend's name is Betty

British neuroscientist Adrian Raine was the first to scan the heads of murders to observe their brain activity in California. The reason Professor Raine was drawn to California was because of the homicides and murders there were in the whole state of California. Throughout a couple years, professor Raine kept scanning the brains of murders and noticed something that appeared in similarly in most of the murders. There was reduced activity in the frontal cortex of the brain. The frontal cortex is the area of the brain where our emotional instincts are controlled. Professor Raine also discovered that the amygdala, is where our emotions and motivations come from, is over activated. This proves that serial killers and murderers have trouble controlling themselves due to the their emotional state from the frontal cortex. What causes the brain to behave this way? Well, Raine’s studies suggest that childhood abuse and childhood trauma is the cause for the emotions of a person to be overwritten. One of the patients Professor Raine scanned was Donta Paige. He was charged with brutally murdering a twenty four year old woman who caught him breaking into her house. As a child, Paige was abused by his mother and every time it got worse. His mother would use electrical cords, shoes or whatever was around her to abuse her son usually on a daily basis. "Early physical abuse, amongst other things could

“Where are you going, where have you been” has been surrounded in a veil of mystery since it was first written by Joyce Carol Oates in 1966. This is largely due to the uneasiness caused by the story’s premature ending. Many different theories have been developed to try to make sense of the cliffhanger.

As technology continues to evolve, our understanding of sickness and disease grows as well. Modern day technology is able to tell doctors what caused the disease and in ideal situations how to cure it. Recent scientists have begun to look at the desire to kill as a disease. This theory poses an interesting concept that if it is a disease, then maybe there is a cure that prevents serial killers from killing. In Christer Claus and Lars Lidberg’s article they look at the desire to kill as a disease. The article states that while using Schahriar Syndrome as a model, they are able to explain even the most vicious human behaviours, such as planned and repeated homicide (Claus/Lidberg 428). This disease is broken down into five main characteristics: omnipotence, sadistic fantasies, ritualized performance, dehumanization, and symbiotic merger. These five traits are not only common among people with the disease, but among serial killers as well (428). The article states that after a successful killing, the killer is surprised. When the killer is able to get away with murder, a sense of amazement consumes them. Once the killer has repeatedly killed their victim and escaped the authorities, they begin to feel like they are omnipotent. As time goes on, over fifty percent of serial killers experience sadistic fantasies that make them want to keep committing the crimes. Each killer uses their success and sadistic fantasies to form a certain ritual. They begin to believe that if they are

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.

Arnold Friend, Joyce Carol Oates's antagonist in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is a man that persuades Connie, the fifteen-year-old protagonist and target of Arnold's thirst, into abandoning her home, her family and succumbing to his power. Observed through the supernatural lens, Arnold Friend can be described as a malevolent force that displays many characteristics of a vampire.

This shows a possibility of the type of unwanted attention she may receive in the future. Provided that she remains focused on a male’s attention, she may attract unsolicited attention from a dangerous predator such as a stalker who knows all aspects of her life. After, Connie feels “her breath start jerking back and forth in her lungs as if it were something Arnold Friend was stabbing her with again and again with no tenderness” (5). The description illustrates Arnold stabbing her chest, without actually touching her. This sounds rather bizarre and uncanny.

From the readers view the title touches on Connie’s dilemma as she confronts Arnold Friend, who wants to take her away to an unknown future: “The place where you came from ain’t there anymore,” Arnold tells her, “and where you had in mind to go is cancelled out”. The ending kind of creeps up on you, in much the same way that Arnold gradually and insistently convinces Connie to join him in his car. The story starts off in a psychologically realistic mode as it registers every nuance in Connie's sensibility. But as Connie realizes how much danger she's in, the story sort of shifts gears. The language moves from realism to an almost surreal or supernatural register. Connie is described as feeling possessed, her heart is a “pounding, living thing inside this body that wasn't really hers either” and “having an out-of-body

“ Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is a short story by Joyce Carol Oates. In this short story, the setting took place in the 1960’s with a 15 year old girl named Connie. Connie is a teenager who is playing around with her friends and guys. Connie’s mother is rude to Connie, so Connie starts to acts up. When Connie starts to play around with guys, she meets a man named Arnold Friend.

One may never realize the people surrounding one’s everyday life, crammed with bodies of contrasting characters, pasts’, and styles; however, who are these people genuinely? Arnold Friend, in the short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by Joyce Carol Oates, managed to deceive with his false characteristics. Arnold Friend was brought to life from Oates’s imagination of the mischievous serial killer Charles Schmid. Arnold Friend and Charles Schmid similarly attempted to delude with false attributes, had an interest in women, deceived women, both tried to create a false imagine for themselves, however Friend knew about everything about his victim while Schmid did not.

Joyce Carol Oates has kept her true inspiration behind “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” in order to create a willing suspension of disbelief between realism and fantasy. The short story by Oates was released soon after the newspaper published the murders committed by Charles Schmid Jr. in 1966. The story displays numerous resembling details that match the real-life murder case involving “The Pied Piper” of Tucson Arizona. Many writers have written literary pieces on the story expressing inverse views in search for their own figurative meaning. While there are many interpretations of this story and they all include valid points, the

She ends up leaving with him not knowing what he in stored for her. Connie characterization as a self absorbed

The short story Where are you going, Where have you been? by Joyce Carol Oates is a chilling tale of teen abduction. Although horrifying, the story didn’t end like I thought it would on my first read through. Connie isn’t carried away by her abductor kicking and screaming, nor dragged away unconscious. While not exactly based on her own freewill, she chooses to go.

Joyce Carol Oates’s Where are you going, where have you been? is a post-modernist story. The primary theme is childhood versus adulthood. The story explores Connie’s, the main character’s, ambivalence about adulthood.

Through these discoveries it is evident that these mental ailments are caused by someone’s nature rather than how they were nurtured as child. There are many different regions of the brain that all have a function of their own to control. In special cases parts of the brain can be underdeveloped or even non-existent. In the case of illnesses such as sociopathy and psychopathy it’s been found that the conditions are, “related to a physiological defect that results in the underdevelopment of the part of the brain responsible for impulse control and emotions” (Bonn). For many psychopaths murder and violence tend to occur in moments of chaos where the person may be overwhelmed and craving release, the violence is the release that lets their emotions return to a content state.