where are you going and more like what is your story about let's talk about this classic masterpiece from joyce carol oates coming up today i'm going down the rabbit hole with you all right guys welcome back to the codex cantina a place where we take a conversational approach to literature discussing what it could mean my name is oona and i'm krypto and this is one of those pieces that has a lot of different ways that you can look at it you probably have come across this in one of your short story collections maybe it was recommended to you in a class but this is one that is just i think it can work both on a story level on a metaphorical level and i think it's just one of those classic pieces that can really open up people's eyes to the power of the short story i'm really interested in seeing your interpretations because i think ours are slightly different on here and that's what i love about the power of short stories is how you can take a piece i can take a piece and we can read the same thing and come up with different points of view and and different perspectives well for me i know one thing that i really kind of honed in on is that this is kind of in my view a time piece this came out in 1966. if you look up in like you know articles online you'll see that there's some references to charles schmid who is an actual serial killer at the time and that this character might have been based upon there's a lot of draws upon him but also there's at the time in the 60s i mean you had love free you had an american love revolution here with what did it mean to be intimate with someone and as well on this story it's dedicated to bob dylan who i think is a very important influential figure to this story so what happens in this piece is actually quite forward while there's lots of details it's pretty easy to see the structure part one is kind of what i would call the act right fifteen-year-old connie spends her time hanging out with some friends in the summer doing kid things and she's preoccupied with her looks and annoyed with her family yeah been there in particular her mother who she feels nags her too much mom i love you but you did nag a lot i'm just saying and connie heads out one night with a boy named eddie another another man sees them uh hanging out by a gold painted convertible and says gonna get you baby and connie and eddie head down an alley together and i think it's left up to the reader's imagination but this was the time where i was like hey man love free you know and you're you're meant to imply that there's a lot of uh sensuality that might be happening behind the alley door security yeah yeah yeah so that's the act is kind of how i view the one part and then the second part is what i would call the punishment in a sense and we'll have to get through you know whether we actually believe that or not but time passes and then on a sunday when connie's family has left for a barbecue across town the man in the convertible pulls up he says his name is arnold friend what a name there right that's already about that's already a red flag like no no the cr it went from like okay arnold friend to like whoa arnold that that's not working for me this you get the creep factor here and he's like well why don't you just hop into my ride it'll be cool oh boy he goes on to explain that he's learned a lot about connie definitely setting her at ease with all this information and uh and even knows that her family is gone across town on what they're doing or at least claims he does his words become increasingly direct sensual and violent and promises if she touches that phone he's coming in to get her connie panics and tries to call the police but can't hear's nothing but wailing she leaves with arnold and plot so fairly simple on the surface you have um you know i think one of the things that we need to talk to obviously i set it up that way kind of unfair of me but we got to talk about duality there is definitely a split to to the two parts of the story but also even in in the description of this we have a quote where they say everything about her had two sides to it one for home and one for anywhere that was not home and i mean come on we see echoes of this even today you know decades later about the people that when they leave the house what was that movie the like i think was like clueless where like she like goes to school and like all preppy clothes and as soon as she gets to school she like really revealing sensual clothes because you know of course parents wouldn't condone their daughter walking out showing a midriff and you know a lot of leg basically right so you have the at home you know oh i'm a good girl and then you have the private life where you're being more sensual and i think you can kind of see some elements of that with what happens in the opening scene right with this love revolution a love free what does connie do that might be a topic of this story for me i took the two pieces i definitely agree that there's the duality and i took the two pieces as act one is the vanity setting up connie as a little bit conceited and thinking that she's better than everybody and you know even that her mom is you know appealing to her beauty and everything and then you have act two which i see is more of like the seduction as you know arnold is seducing her away from her vanity and her family and her standard of life and that's how i kind of viewed that the two different parts of the story you know and then if we were to modernize the story not that it needs it by any means i don't mean to imply that but you know that there's obviously some parts that aren't true from the 60s to today but i think the core message here right of that vanity of of maybe being over centralized and living for that public thrill maybe you still see a little bit of that today like you know maybe you think about instagram and how there's there's the you and every day and then there's your instagram life where you're dressing yourself up to look very you know like you're living your best life on social media if you will and you know there's plenty of stories of instagram stalkers and not to give out too much personal information on public you know social media platforms because why well because of stuff like this like this story there are instagram stalkers out there there are those people that will prey upon that over sensuality and are driven and drive towards it that there's maybe even a little bit of a um cautionary tale to this that still resonates probably today oh definitely i think that you could get easily catfished he'd probably more easily get catfish today than what connie had to to go through with arnold in this story here and something that maybe doesn't resonate as strong with us so so you and me are the speakers of this channel we're men right we probably might have a little bit more security at times walking around at night being home alone uh not that neither any of us want to be abducted or attacked in our house but we probably don't have the same level of fear as a young girl who doesn't have as much life experience and is is probably terrified at this man showing up at the door do you think that that is a portion of this being a timepiece or do you think that still resonates today to the youth the young ladies today or young people in general i think it has to right i mean let's go back through time even in like the 70s or even the 80s you had films like halloween with michael myers you know you saw him and he was obviously a scary person but it's that it's that when you see him just standing across the yard just looking at you being pure evil staring into your soul and all of a sudden you have these security blankets that you create in life you know like being around friends you know having a locked door it's when you're confronted with that direct evil your blankets start to get ripped away like i had a friend here recently his his girlfriend unfortunately it's the holidays right now her apartment was broken into while she was gone and you know her landlord offered to buy her uh one of those video cameras for the doorbell and she's like no that's not enough like i need the iron rot fence like i need a physical barrier between me and the outside world and that's what connie's being presented with right her security blanket's gone it's just her at home with with arnold outside and she's facing this evil that is i don't know do you take it just on a story level of him being interested in her or do you take it on a metaphorical level where he's meant to represent evil of some sort i'm glad you brought up the evil aspect and i'm glad that you brought up the idea of halloween and michael myers because the first time i read this i'll be honest i struggled with a little bit of what was the point of the story and i don't know if i enjoyed it a lot and i did a little bit of research and came back to it and read it a second time and got a lot more out of it because i was expecting that oats was gonna make connie the hero i thought that she was gonna vanquish arnold friend michael myers and at the end of the story she leaves with him i'm like wait what no you're supposed to like fight back that's what happens in the story you're the heroine this is the rise of feminism and i was like oh man i was like i'm missing something here so i went back and that's when i did a little bit of research and i found out that it was it was dedicated to bob dylan and i saw i was like oh i think that she's being seduced by arnold friend and that that it isn't necessarily that evil aspect that he is so much maybe we're led to believe that there's a little bit more undertone here that i missed the first time reading through it well there's something to be said about what is what is the male presence in this story right i don't think joyce carol oates was going down like that feminism route like you were saying but i do think that it's very clear that she's got a she's got a view advantage from the female perspective we see only through connie we don't see what arnold fiend friend is thinking i know there's that theme theory out there if you take away the honors but um what do we see when we look at this and we see the father is not really present like he's kind of absent a little bit we see connie looking for the attention from boys like eddie and use hers uses her promiscuity the love revolution to kind of attract it that um maybe maybe we can almost view arnold as even a stereotype of the bad boy he's the uh culmination maybe of all the bad traits of of the of what connie might be attracted to in a sense and this is the route that i jumped on after researching and realizing that it's dedicated to bob dylan i thought that's it and many people have suggested that arnold is supposed to be a metaphorical representation of bob dylan he's modeled after bob dylan of that you know he's the good-looking suave young guy that seduces the ladies with his love songs and if you look at how arnold has written a few of the quotes in here he talks of this reciting the words to a song he chants there is slight rhythmic lilt the sing-song ways half-sung all of his language revolves around some type of musical aspect and those little pieces i was like oh oh oh okay i'm picking up what you're throwing down no oats i finally got it and i finally got excited as i was reading through this and realized that that is definitely a way that you can interpret this story that arnold is that seduction to the young people of something different that is not what their parents would approve of i do like that because i think that that fits all these narratives that we've talked about whether you view whether you're viewing this as the battle of morality of of love and such and you view arnold as the devil in a sense she's making a choice of whether to love you know before marriage or not that's one way to look at it you can also look at it from the perspective of the revolution of what harm could promiscuity bring to you and then here we have the dangers coming in and now you have also the seduction of love from a bob dylan song perspective too they all kind of just work which is why i think this story is so i just think it's so good because it can resonate on all these different levels of just being an interesting and thrilling story where you start to feel the pressure here at the end it works on the metaphorical story where all of our themes and elements that we talked about from the idea of love seducing you aside like it all just seems to kind of work with this story there was one object in the story that kind of threw me through a little bit of loop was the phone of that when she was touching the phone making the calls which she couldn't make by the way which was also kind of strange so why couldn't he come into the house when she was touching the phone what was the symbology there that that represented i i think you can take it a lot of different ways for me my mind went back to the whole vampire lore of you know you couldn't let a vampire couldn't just come into a house right you have to invite the vampire in and what's what's the reasoning behind this why do authors use this old shtick and a lot of the time it comes down to our earlier point of inviting evil in and they talk about vampires being representation of stealing youth so a vampire comes along and basically takes away the the humanity of these young girls the youth of them if you will and i think that you can see a little bit maybe of that conversation too of what does it mean to be promiscuous what if you have kids or your life you know changes drastically after this it's not just a simple fling always this might be part of the conversation and maybe that's what connie is choosing is connie going to live that life that she has been living or is she going to change and step out into the uh the metaphorical world here with arnold i think arnold is evil i mean obviously he's threatening to kill the family there's nothing nice about that nothing more i think it's a universal evil morality right but at the same time here's connie trying to find herself in this world she's fighting back against her parents like teenagers do i i might have been a little harsh on connie in the beginning but by this point i think i was a little bit more sympathetic for her that i realized that maybe she's just inexperienced and now connie is making that metaphorical decision so i'm stepping out of the story interpretation and now taking it at that level of her choosing to give up that lifestyle that she was living you mentioned earlier that arnold friend could also be you know maybe shortened to arch fiend and i think that lends itself to oh you know a devil or a fallen angel and he's in disguise they talk about his ill-footing boots and there's been suggestion that you know maybe he has hooves and stuff you know so he's in disguise and that's why his clothes don't fit and you do have to invite the devil in and there's a few little subtle nuances that this borders on that supernatural element that he's not just you know uh a psychopath that's coming in to murder his family that there is that seduction of the dark side and you have you know a lot of parents that are afraid of you know rock and roll is the devil's music as well and we know and we've already talked about that music was so influential i think that there's again so many different ways to interpret the story and that's what i love of all these little hidden gems that oats throws at us that is it right is it not right i don't know you get to interpret what you think all right here's my last curveball for you does connie know what she's stepping into at the end i think you have to i think that many philosophers um and and oats was a big fan of kicker guard you're you're a guy right that i didn't know that yeah philosophy i started following her twitter and i think that many philosophers say that we're innately good most of them might think that and that you have to invite evil in so i think that she knows what she's doing um interesting interesting well we'll leave a playlist down below for more joyce carol oates talks that we have i think this was definitely an interesting story if you enjoyed the conversation and i'm not sure how to contribute to the conversation feel free to leave an emoji of the devil down below it helps the channel out helps people think that you like us we appreciate you guys if you did like us hitting that subscribe button because we appreciate it my name has been uno we post videos every monday and thursday luna out peace