How does music work in the story? Does music seem to affect the waythat Connie acts and thinks?
What will be an ideal response?
- Music has a very direct effect on the way that Connie acts and thinks. In paragraph 6, describing the drive-in restaurant at which she and her friends hang out, Oates writes: “They sat at the counter and crossed their legs at the ankles, their thin shoulders rigid with excitement, and listened to the music that made everything so good: the music was always in the background, like music at a church service, it was something to depend upon.” The music that fills her otherwise largely uncluttered head presents a superficial, oversimplified view of life that has no doubt had a major influence in shaping Connie’s sense of reality. Alone in her house on Sunday afternoon, before Arnold Friend’s arrival, she “listened for an hour and a half to a program called XYZ Sunday Jamboree, record after record of hard, fast, shrieking songs she sang along with” (par. 14). This program, playing simultaneously inside the house and out in the yard on Ellie Oscar’s transistor radio, is seized on by Arnold Friend as a topic of conversation in his attempt at ingratiating himself with Connie.
We should also bear in mind that this story is dedicated to Bob Dylan. It may be unlikely that any of Dylan’s music flows through Connie’s mind, but it is a real presence in the story in a number of ways. Some of Arnold Friend’s repartee seems a weak-minded imitation of Dylanese: surreal and disconnected, as in his tirade to Ellie (par. 133): “Don’t hem in on me . . .” Arnold Friend bears a faint resemblance to Dylan: he has “a familiar face, somehow,” with hawk-like nose and hair “crazy as a wig,” and he talks with a lilting voice “as if he were reciting the words to a song.” His approach is “slightly mocking, kidding, but serious and a little melancholy,” and he taps his fists together “in homage to the perpetual music behind him” (par. 77). Joyce Carol Oates has remarked that Dylan’s song “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” (1965) was an influence on her story. Dylan’s lyric addresses a young girl, Baby Blue (“My sweet little blue-eyed girl,” Arnold calls Connie), who must make a hasty departure from home across an unreal, shifting landscape. A vagabond raps at her door, and she is told, “Something calls for you / Forget the dead you’ve left.” In Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” the young woman is told about “Napoleon in rags,” whom she has previously laughed at: “Go to him now, he calls you, you can’t refuse.” Oates’s title recalls a line from another Dylan song, “Mr. Tambourine Man”: “And there is no place I’m goin’ to.”
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