My Impressions

Stories, movies, and music all have their own ways of expressing a story to their audience. Stories give the audience text but the reader provides the character’s voice and image. Songs give the audience a story and a voice but the listener still provides an image. Movies provide the reader with everything about the character but this enables the watcher to dive deeper into the story. Oate’s story is a good story but it has creepy undertones throughout the plot. When you read “Where are you going, Where have you been?” you create the voices and images for Connie, Arnold, Elle, etc. The reader makes the story their own with their individual character expressed while they read. When you watch the short film, you get a voice for the characters and it changes your perception of the story. The short film changes the plot of the story but the basic idea of “Where are you going, Where have you been?” is still there. Bob Dylan’s “Its all over now, Baby blue” has the voices like the short story but the reader has to work more to create the story. All of them change my view on the story because I watched the movie “Smooth Talk” first. I already had an image for the characters and their voices before I read everything else. However, the other iterations had an effect on how I perceived the story. I was able to dive deeper into the story because of all the different views and information I got on the characters. The most interesting and disturbing pieces that I read were the non-fiction ones. It shows me that it is no longer a “make believe” story and it was inspired by true events. The story becomes real in a sense and it makes me that more involved in wanting to know everything that happened.