For my final essay in English last year, I wrote an analysis on Joyce Carol Oates ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ through a psychological lens. I closely analyzed this story for weeks, learned and memorized its intricacies and complexities like the back of my hand, and spent so much time with it that it became my best friend. I read this story so much that each of its different interpretations became this jumbled mess in my brain that I could not decipher. At the time, I thought open-ended stories like these were cool, complex and interesting. But now, looking back, having several interpretations of a text is just confusing and doesn’t really help the reader. My first rough draft of my essay had the simplest interpretation of the text: Arnold Friend was just a caricature of a real serial killer in the 60s. However, throughout my research, this interpretation quickly became antiquated. By the time I submitted my final essay, I had gone through at least five different interpretations of the text that I had thought was the best one at the time. I don’t even think the one I wrote about is necessarily the ‘best’ one, it was just the one I resonated with the most and found myself agreeing with more. The truth is, there is no ‘correct’ interpretation of the text and despite how interesting that sounds, it’s just confusing. I do appreciate open-ended texts, but my only critique is that sometimes they get so ambiguous that it’s not even ‘complex’ anymore, it’s just convoluted and unfathomable.