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When Connie faces Arnold Friend, she faces her other self, in Oates's treatment of the Doppelgänger motif, which informs such well-known works as Poe's “William Wilson,” Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener,” Crane's “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky,” and Conrad's “The Secret Sharer,” among many others. The principal outward difference between these and Oates's version, Connie's alter ego being of the opposite sex and extremely threatening, results from Arnold Friend's representing not only a protagonist's mythic, irrational side (one of several characteristics he shares with his literary forerunners), but also a cluster of insights into the violence and sexuality of adulthood. His indeterminate age, somewhere between eighteen and thirty, emphasizes the transition which Connie must undergo, one reflected in the future-past duality inherent in the title of the story (Gillis 67).
We first see Connie at home, an ordinary middle-class setting, complete with a mother who runs the household and nags, an older “maiden” sister, and an uninvolved father who appears only to work, eat, read the newspaper, and sleep. Together, these people drive away, out of the story, to a conventional Sunday barbecue. Connie's father, like her friend's father who chauffeurs the girls to the shopping plaza, “never bothered to ask what they had done” (Oates 35). The father's lack of involvement allows Connie a relative degree of freedom. No one ever asks, “Where are you going, Where have you been?”
The house and the domestic environment represent the known, the rationally apprehendable, much like the law in