Where are you going, where have you been?

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You been?” a short story based on a psychopath killer who charms his victims before murdering them. The background makes me wonder what literary significance this story could possibly have; however, through further reading it was easy to find hidden meanings in the story, and even possible themes could be spotted quite quickly. The first thing that struck me when reading this story was the motif of music that never seemed to go away. We see music being brought up in Connie’s car rides, when she’s at home, at the strip mall, when she’s talking to Arnold, and music is even compared to the rhythm in people’s sentences. To Connie it was “music that made everything so good” (pg469), but this wasn’t the case for most of society in the time period that the story is set. It was set and written in a time period when parents didn’t want their children listening to music because it was a bad influence and was considered “satanic”. This is very significant to the story and could be the reason why Connie and her mother always seem to be fighting with each other. This could show a relationship between her love for music and her almost rebellious personality. How she stays home instead of going out with her family and goes on dates with boys when she’s supposed to be at the mall or movies with her sister and her sister’s friends. The author seems to want to give music a bad reputation as being bad to listen to and even harmful. We see music as being harmful when Arnolds friend Ellie is called deaf and we can see that he is because he has the radio on full blast right next to his ears. This makes me think of music as an addiction. Even though Ellie knows that the music is hurting his ears he can’t seem to stop listening to it. Ellie seems to be controlled by music as well as being controlled by Arnold, which points to Arnold, who is a psychopath killer, being a symbol of the negative influence of music, the harm it causes, and its addictiveness. Arnold is using music to tempt Connie to come with him and be like Ellie, powerless. Ellie and Connie are listening to the exact same music, which foreshadows that if she continues to listen to music like she does she will go down a bad path. Arnold is showing metaphorically that the evilness caused by music is waiting at her doorstep. And can get her at anytime. She is even metaphorically stabbed by Arnold and then is seems to walk through her door into another world, almost like an afterlife world. She watches her self pass through it so it’s as if she is no longer in control of her body and mind. Arnold is in control or music is in control of her life. I believe this is metaphorically saying that music has killed her or destroyed her life, which is a very surprising meaning from such an odd story.