What hints does Oates give us that Arnold Friend is not what he seems?Do you find him funnyor ...

Much about him seems fakery: his masklike face and stage voice, his gilded jalopy, his artificially padded boots, his affecting the speech, dress, and music of the youth culture (although he is over thirty). Looked at this way, he seems a silly, pathetic goof. But this is only one aspect of his character and his function in the story. What, for instance, are we to make of his strangely detailed knowledge of Connie and her family, of his apparent ability to see what is happening at the barbecue, miles away? Is he a supernatural character? Perhaps Arnolds knowledge was obtained merely by pumping Connies friends for information and by keeping close watch on her house, and perhaps his reported vision of the barbecue is merely feigned for Connies benefit. Still, there are hints that he is a devil or a warlock. Perhaps Ellie Oscar, the forty-year-old baby, is his imp or familiar; perhaps his bendable boot conceals a cloven hoof. He works a kind of magic: on first spying Connie he draws a sign in the air that marks her for his own. He threatens to possess her very soul: he will enter her where its all secret and then, after the sex act, she will give in to him (par. 104). A charismatic person like Charles Manson, he seeks young girls to dominate. Oates herself has remarked: The story itself is a Hawthornian parable of a kind, realistic in its surface texture but otherwise allegorical (interview with Barbara C. Millard, Four Quartets, Fall 1988). Is it, then, an account of a confrontation with the Devil, comparable with Young Goodman Brown?

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What hints does Oates give us that Arnold Friend is not what he seems?Do you find him funnyor ...

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