"Where are you going, where have you been?" by Joyce Carol Oates is a modern interpretation of the classic narrative of evil tempting innocence. Oates' version of the devil allegory combines this Christian model of temptation with contemporary secular society. Connie is a cute fifteen-year-old girl, beginning the process of maturing into adulthood. She begins to become aware of her ability to act on her own volition, but her naivety makes her unaware of Arnold Friend's layers of deception. Connie's blindness is the pretext for her loss of innocence and subsequent fall from grace. Connie plays with the idea of ​​adulthood, but at fifteen she is still too young for her actions to be considered acceptable by her parents, so Connie lives a double life. He is one person at home and someone completely different when he leaves. She unbuttons her blouse, adds a little sexiness to her step, wears lipstick, and adds a flirtatious touch to her laugh when she leaves home and family. The narrative implies that Connie experiments with sexuality, spending hours with boys in alleys, but her conception of sex, love and boys is highly romanticized and naive: "Her mind drifted to thoughts of the boy she had been with the night before and how cute he was." had been, how sweet he always was, not as someone like June would have supposed, but sweet, kind, as he was in the movies and as he promised in the songs,” (122). His idealized conception of his encounters highlights his fixation on a sort of lived fantasy that blinds her to reality. Connie stages mini-stories with boys that she compares to dreamy portrayals in films and songs. However, Connie's concern for boys has nothing to do with the individual boy ... in the center of the paper... opened so wide that she sees herself going towards Arnold Friend and her inevitable downfall. Connie leaves the house, marking her fall from grace, loss of innocence and awakening of conscience The anthropomorphization of a figure of absolute evil is archetypal: from Satan in Milton's Paradise Lost, to the Mephistopheles in Goethe's Faust. ArnoldFriend's grotesqueness lies in Connie's blindness; Through Oates' depiction of an incarnate devil preying on a contemporary youth, Oates captures the timelessness of reality and the presence of evil. Oates departs from Paradise Lost and Faust in that there is no redemption for Connie. Her twisted fate is all there is to her. This nihilistic closure leaves us with an empty feeling, but it seems to be exactly what the Devil would want.