Regarding the story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, I understand why Rena Korb interprets it as an “inverted fairytale”. It highlights a teenage girl, Connie’s, naivety and vanity as she grows into a young woman, craving independence (her family-life doesn’t exactly help with that either). She soon became familiar with Arnold Friend and Ellie who had seemingly been stalking her and had learned things about her she never revealed. Unknown to Connie, Arnold is manipulating her, faking this folksy persona to a degree that you suspect he’d spent years perfecting. Personally, around this time, it’s getting hard for me to contain my emotions as I can understand the physical jolt she implies from her bubbling anxiety as she finally sees what the man in the backseat looks like. To relate back to the inverted fairytale angle, I would say the typical prince charming is alluring and persistent (somehow not seen as creepy) as where Arnold Friend can be interpreted as the embodiment of evil as the implication at the end of the story is spoken for.
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