Reality vs. Dreams

Where the Dream becomes Reality Have you ever wondered if your entire life has been a living dream? In the short story, “Where are you going, Where have you been?” Joyce Carol Oates uses the motif of the music and the dream-like imagery in order to convey that Connie is having a nightmare that was created by her conscience and Arnold Friend is a collection of all the bad things she has done. Connie’s conscience is tainted by the things she does and thinks as a teenager. While fighting with her mother, “Connie wished her mother was dead and she herself was dead and it was all over” (Oates 1). The fact that Connie wishes that her mother and herself were dead shows some evil inside her, because no good child would wish something that extreme to their parents and themselves. By committing these acts Connie’s conscience gets dirty bit by bit. During her girl’s night out Connie “spent three hours with him [Eddie], at the restaurant…then down an alley a mile or so away” (Oates 2). Connie going to the alley with Eddie suggests that they both engaged in some sort of sexual activity. These actions fill her with sin, corrupting her conscience even more without her even knowing so. The music played throughout the entire story suggests that Connie fell asleep while listening to the radio and she hears the music being played while in her nightmare. When at the drive-in restaurant, “[They] listened to the music that made everything so good: the music was always in the background” (Oates 2). The symbol of the music is introduced here and it serves as a motif to show how the story is a nightmare. The importance of the music is stated in this quote. When Connie sees Arnold on his car, “She had the idea that he had driven up the driveway all right but had come from nowhere before that and belonged nowhere and that everything about him and the music was so familiar to her was only half real” (Oates 8). The motif of music here shows how Connie recognizes the music, and it supports how she could have gone to sleep to her own music and her mind went to this nightmare which appears to be reality. Connie’s brain creates things as the dream progresses. She notices that “ [Arnold Friend] had come from nowhere before that and belonged nowhere” (Oates 8), Arnold is fixed up by herself as he comes from nowhere and all of a sudden he is created, created from her conscience. “…Connie began to hear the music. It was the same program that was playing inside the house” (Oates 4). The music that is played outside the nightmare, that Connie fell asleep to, is the same music that she hears inside her house and the same that she hears in Ellie’s radio. The music surrounds her making her brain make it part of the nightmare that she is having. Connie shows signs of sweating when her shirt is wet by the terror that Arnold Friend causes her, as well as her ability to see the scene in a third person view. When Arnold is telling Connie that she is her lover she gets terrified and, “Her heart was almost too big for her chest and the pumping made sweat break out all over her” (Oates 9). This shows that Arnold Friend terrifies Connie to the point where she sweats from all over her body. When a person is having a nightmare the majority of the time sweat is released by the body because of the apprehension and terror they are facing inside their nightmare. In Connie’s situation she faces a great amount terror that is caused by the “bad” in her dream. This approves that Connie is in fact having a nightmare because of her sweating. Inside her house, “She was sitting on the floor with her back against the wall” (Oates 12). Connie’s terror grows into a fear against Arnold Friend, inside her nightmare she sweats as a result from that fear, in the outside she sweats because of the fear that the nightmare caused her as a whole. “She watched herself push the door slowly open as if she were back safe somewhere” (Oates 13). The fact that she can see herself settles that she is in fact in a nightmare, because when you are having a nightmare or a dream you don’t see in first person you everything in a third person view, allowing you to see things around you and yourself. The things that Connie does build up and eat her conscience away, like wishing death upon her mother and herself, having some type of sexual relations with Eddie and other things. Connie’s conscience creates a nightmare and creates the character of Arnold Friend as a way to show her that she is doing bad and should correct herself. Even though it is not stated by the author that Connie is having a nightmare, it is implied by her use of the dream-like imagery and the motif of music. The conscience creates things, feelings, and emotions to show that one is doing wrong. In Connie’s case her dark conscience creates the nightmare in order to show that she is doing badly in the life that she is living.