Similarities in the Short Stories "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"

When first reading the two short stories, "A Good Man is Hard to Find" and "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?", the similarities in the narratives may not seem readily apparent. But upon closer analysis, one can find numerous similarities in the writing styles and techniques used by the authors, Flannery O'Connor and Joyce Carol Oates, respectively.

The protagonist of each story is female: Oates' central focus is on the teenaged Connie and O'Connor's nameless character is simply, "the grandmother". Obviously from different generations and of different ages, they share several common characteristics that lead to key parallels in the stories. The fact that both characters are vain, selfish, and self-centered is most apparent.

The grandmother's selfishness is first presented in the fact that she takes her cat with her on vacation, "because he would miss her too much and she was afraid he might brush against one of the gas burners and accidentally asphyxiate himself" (O'Connor 1097). Cats are known as being independent, and it is more likely that the grandmother would miss the cat and not the other way around. Her reasons for smuggling the cat into the car were purely selfish and not for the cat's benefit. Connie's selfishness is also readily evident. She thinks only of herself and her own pleasure through the early paragraphs of the story. On the fateful Sunday when Arnold Friend comes to visit, Connie shuns the family barbecue, "rolling her eyes to let her mother know just what she thought of it" (Oates 2129). Connie's egotistical behavior, while typical of many teenagers, was inconsiderate of her family's feelings.