Fiction has many elements such as point of view, character, theme, and plot. No matter what point of view the story is told or how the story is plotted a character must go through some sort of change. While the character may not change in the story, they may goes through an experience which leads the reader to imagine how that experience may have changed that character. Two of the stories I want to focus on are “The Fat Girl” and “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?”
“The Fat Girl” revolves around a girl named Louise who was, just as the title implies, a fat girl.. Her mother would limit her to a diet, telling her that if she is not skinny the boys will not like her. At night, when her mother was sleeping she would snack on just about anything she could get her hands on. To everyone else she was just a girl who was destined to be fat. But as the story quotes, “No one saw the store of Milky Ways, Butterfingers, Almond Joys, and Hersheys far back on her closet shelf, behind the stuffed animals of her childhood.” (pg. 127)
Louise heads off to college and meets a friend named Carrie. Carrie helps her diet and over the course of a year Louise goes from 184 to 136 pounds. She a skinny and beautiful and eats a very healthy, lean diet. She meets a man named Richard and they eventually get married. Richard is a tall, handsome man, someone Louise would have never imagined being with. Louise becomes pregnant and during her pregnancy, she begins to go back to her old eating habits. She would hide snacks in a secret place and eat when no one was watching. While convinced it’s just the baby fat, Richard becomes concerned that it’s not just water weight, but straight fat and tells her to cut down on her eating which Louise resents him for.
After having the child Louise has trouble getting back to the skinny figure she had prior having the baby. Richard becomes less affectionate, almost bitter towards her. He was no longer attracted to her. When she claims he never touches her, he comes back, “I don’t want to touch you. Why should I? Have you looked at yourself? (pg. 138) After a few fights, he tells her that he still loves her and will diet with her. However she doesn’t believe him. She expects that after she puts her baby to sleep Richard will have left the house and left her for good so she grabs a candy bar from her stash and heads downstairs. The problem is, she finds Richard still standing there and she is caught. The story ends there, leaving the reader to wonder how Louise may have changed after finally being caught. The story would have lost anyone’s attention if she was fat the whole story.
“Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?” is about a rebellious teenage girl named Connie who thinks she is on top of the world. Her sister was a plain girl who was older and helped her mother, had a job, and saved money. Her sister’s mind wasn’t, “filled with trashy daydreams.” (pg. 348) She took advantage of her mother’s naïve thought that Connie lived the same teenage life as her plain, steady sister. When Connie was dropped off at the mall to catch a movie with her friends, they would sneak across the highway to a plaza where the older kid’s hung out. They would meet older boys of whom Connie would day dream about the next day. Connie would return to the mall when she was being picked up and all her mother would ask was how the movie was.
One Sunday, Connie’s family was going to a barbeque. When asked to go, Connie roller her eyes at her mother who was quick to let her stay home alone. A man that she saw one night at the plaza had come to her house. At first it seems like a something out of a cute love story and Connie plays along, being complete ignorant to the fact that this older man was a dangerous stalker. After some innocent flirting, Connie realizes that this man was not ready to leave without her and she becomes scared for herself. She threatens to call the police and the man, who called himself Arnold Friend, says that he will break his promise not to come into the house if she touches the phone. She runs to the phone and Arnold comes in. He grabs her and makes her hang up the phone and brings her to his, to a place where she had never been before and describes as “so much land that she had never seen before.”
The story ends, and the read never knows what happened to Connie. In the event that she even survives the event, one may think that this experience changes her from the rebellious teen to one more like her sister. Hopefully she would start to hope that her mother might her more questions, and be a little more concerned with the activities that she up to. Whether or not Connie became a more obedient teen or not, or if Louise stayed a fat girl that she was, these stories would have no substance if these characters didn’t go through the attitude or habit changing events that they experienced.
Works Cited
Dubus, Andre. "The Fat Girl." The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories. Ed. Tobias Wolff. New York: Vintage, 1994. 125-40. Print.
Oates, Joyce Carol. "Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?" The Vintage Book of Contemporary American Short Stories. Ed. Tobias Wolff. New York: Vintage, 1994. 347-65. Print.
