edge of her beauty allows her to draw attention to it from many guys of many ages. She loves the attention that she gets from these boys, and that often seduces her into the decisions that she makes. Her first encounter with Arnold Friend occurs when she is in the car with one of the boys she met, Eddie. She glances to her right and sees Arnold, in his car, staring at her. Arnold spoke with his lips to tell her “Gonna get you, baby”, and perhaps it is this threat that causes Connie to symbolize him as a jeopardy to her innocence that the reader sees in her nightmare (Oates 28). The encounter that Connie experiences with Arnold Friend involves a series of events that would lead someone to believe that he in fact was a figment of her subconscious, or a nightmare. Before their rendezvous, Connie had been sitting “with her eyes closed in the sun”, daydreaming (29). This is the first clue Oates presents the reader to show that Connie falls asleep. In addition to this, when Connie “opened her eyes she hardly knew where she was” (29). When a person is involved in a dream, it is common that they bring familiar faces and places into their minds. Again, this involves the concept of the recurrence of subconscious thought that is entwined with dreams. D.F. Hurley feels that “sleeping (or dozing), then waking (or seeming to awaken), then experiencing a visual alienation from the familiar and the familial (often expressed as the “shrinkage” of the previously known)” are all “characteristic of dream vision tales” (373). It is noticeable that the warmth that the sun provides allows an easy transition from daydreaming to sleeping. This is only the first example of Oates interesting method of bringing the reader into the beginning of Connie’s dream. When Connie began to overheat while bathing in the sun, she decided to go inside. Oates lets the reader know that ̶...
