Preview

Santa Ana Winds In Joan Didion's Los Angeles Notebook

Good Essays
Open Document
Open Document
523 Words
Grammar
Grammar
Plagiarism
Plagiarism
Writing
Writing
Score
Score
Santa Ana Winds In Joan Didion's Los Angeles Notebook
In Joan Didion's "Los Angeles Notebook" her portrayal of the Santa Ana winds includes a unique, "Twilight Zone" tone. Her utilization of foreboding vocabulary made an uneasy tone and complexity of the Santa Ana's with regular life. Didion's utilization of complex components, for example, parallelism, difference, and imagery passes on that by and large, the robotic Santa Ana winds speak to differentiation of a regular, normal existence with the stress that accompanies the Santa Ana winds.

The movement in pace that accompanied Didion's sentence structure demonstrated the development from regularity to stress. Her sentences got to be shorter and all the more rapidly moving. It was similar to the Santa Ana's sped everything up when they blew in. The parallelism of "know it" in the first passage exemplified the omniscient, every single seeing eye of the creator. She did this to demonstrate that the wind influenced everybody.

Didion's assertion decision made a foreboding setting for the Santa Ana winds. The words "shouting", "spooky", and "strange" in section two were utilized to pass on the uneasiness the Santa Ana winds bring. it is similar to a mist of disruption and disorder covers the city as the Santa Ana's ignore.
…show more content…
Her incorporation of the "crazy neighbor with the blade" spoke to the craziness that the winds convey to the city. Difference between the typical life and craziness is likewise indicated when Didion portrayed the "easygoing little wives". They typically succumbed to the force of their spouses, however the winds made them feel enabled and genuinely crazy with the consideration of homicide. Likewise Didion said, "Anything can happen." further supporting a thought of a getaway from the

You May Also Find These Documents Helpful

  • Satisfactory Essays

    In Richard Connell’s thrilling short story “The Most Dangerous Game”, an uneasy mood is constructed by Rainsford’s illusive adventure on Ship Trap Island. Many moments in the short story help build up a feeling of uneasy, one being when Winston uses a simile to describe the evil of the atmosphere, saying that the air “ was actually poisonous”, and that he felt a “mental chill, a sort of sudden dread” when the ship neared the island (Connell 1). The author makes the reader feel uneasy by making just the atmosphere itself seem evil and dangerous with the simile comparing the air to something that kills and is to be avoided. Readers also naturally pick up the feeling of dread from Whitney, which significantly helps in building…

    • 319 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Satisfactory Essays
  • Good Essays

    "Hello, Uncle," Victor said and gave Adolph a hug, gagged at his smell. Alcohol and sweat. Cigarettes and…

    • 2657 Words
    • 11 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    The author sets up the idea of conflict in the beginning paragraph that puts a depressed mood on the readers and this continues throughout the book. California was thought of as “the beginning of the end” (98). She moved to New…

    • 350 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Entering the season of Santa Ana winds, local residents brace themselves. Citizens become cautious and fearful with their lives when facing “something uneasy in the Los Angeles air…some unnatural stillness, some tension.” When the winds make their stealthy presence people become afflicted by it. Didion’s intellectual diction expresses exactly this. She uses these specific words; “uneasy”, “unnatural stillness”, and “tension” to describe the wind and stir up the reader’s emotion making them aware and awed by the situation. Didion draws one in by setting up the story with something abnormal that is bound to happen. These chosen words to depict air, ironically, are the opposite of how air is portrayed in society. Air is something calm and gentle that we routinely inhale; it is our life long companion.…

    • 560 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Brush Fire Analysis

    • 1237 Words
    • 5 Pages

    Didion explicitly said “science bears out folk wisdom.” This means that she believes there is a scientific explanation to why people are on edge during the Santa Ana winds. Through research she discovers that an Israeli physicist discovered that prior to the Santa Ana winds there is an abnormally high level of positively charged ions. The scientist don’t know why this happens, but they do know “positive ions does, in simplest terms, is make people unhappy.” This research into the facts of Santa Ana winds tants her view of the winds, because now she believes that they are affecting her body. Didion uses the Los Angeles Times as a source of her knowledge as well. The Los Angeles Times has a negative perspective of the Santa Ana winds, because it focuses on the deaths and destruction of the winds. This influence has also solidify Didion’s negative perspective on the…

    • 1237 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    In her text, she talks about the changing California from when she was young to today. She stated, “It is hard to find California now, unsettling to wonder how much of it was merely imagined or improvised; melancholy to realize how much of anyone’s memory is no true memory to all but only the traces of someone else’s memory, stories handed down on the family network” (Didion, 177). In the comic, there were just images from someone’s perspective of changing place and from Didion’s essay, she also explained about the developing place and the memories from before to today. Not only this comic goes back to the essay from Joan Didion, but it can also tie with Professor Hothem a lecture about “Snapshots from the Literature of California”. He made a point about saying, “The language of place description is an excellent indicator of our attitudes toward the environment.” By just looking and observing a place or a comic, there are different perspectives and attitudes that are taken by…

    • 550 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Throughout the entirety of the piece, Didion uses apprehensive diction to depict how the Santa Ana winds are changing the citizens and fluctuating them with varying emotions. Didion’s apprehensive diction highlights the Santa Ana winds effect on the mechanistic behaviors of humans by using words such as “eerie”, “ominously”, “uneasy”, and “tension”. Didion uses similar diction in order to put emphasis on her anxious tone. These words are used to establish a sense of cautiousness and mystifying feelings into the audience, pushing an awareness of the winds and how the winds are affecting everyday lives and contributing to the inhuman-like actions.…

    • 536 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    He begins by describing the thousands of dollars in damages of chimneys and walls that the actual earthquake caused, but focuses on the unknown hundreds of millions of dollars in damages that the fire caused that swept through the city afterwards. He then uses hyperbole by saying, "San Francisco is gone." He uses metaphor when he says ". . .the smoke of San Francisco's burning was a lurid tower. . ." He uses personification to paint the picture he sees before him, ". . .this lurid tower swayed in the sky. . ." Again, he uses personification ". . .the flames were leaping forward." Yet again, he uses personification to describe the seemingly alive and unstoppable fire saying, "Thus did the fire build it's own colossal chimney. . ." He follows up by using irony describing the calmness within the city that night, "As remarkable as it may seem, Wednesday night while the whole city crashed and roared in ruin, was a quiet night." Again he uses irony, ". . .in all those hours I saw not one woman who wept, not one man who was excited, not one person who was in the slightest degree panic stricken."…

    • 284 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Santa Ana Winds

    • 409 Words
    • 2 Pages

    In Joan Didion’s Los Angeles Notebook, she depicts the wind’s presence as sinister, however, her description clearly shows that she believes this is an incredibly mysterious and foreboding occurrence. Her use of diction and imagery set the tone for the essay, while her use of detail supports this claim.…

    • 409 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    9/11 Dialectical Journal

    • 756 Words
    • 4 Pages

    Yet all over the news there were warnings telling residents to stay inside their homes and not to go outside. Otherwise they will be injured by flying debris. As the day progressed the storm just got more and more violent. A hush went over everything in their town. All the sudden they were in the eye of the storm. “It’ll stay quiet like this for a while, maybe fifteen, twenty minutes, kind of like an intermission” (Murakami Page.…

    • 756 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Edgar Sawtelle Analysis

    • 705 Words
    • 3 Pages

    So in the end of Sawtelle, the literary device of weather is shown to be a way in which matters would be displayed. Whether it symbolize foreshadowing or the illustrative representation of an ongoing conflict, weather can be used to further emphasize on a subject the author wants the reader to consider as something very…

    • 705 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Joan Didion the Santa Ana

    • 360 Words
    • 2 Pages

    The Santa Ana make people feel very malicious and cruel. Joan Didion used subjective description by displaying the wickedness in the hearts of the people who got hit by the Santa Ana winds when Raymond Chandler said “meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen(36)”. It comes to the point that the humble and harmless women even feel a little evil in them and think of the worst things they can do to people they once cared about. Another example of how Joan Didion used subjective description is when she states how her neighbor would “roam the place with a machete” and how “he would tell [her] that he heard a trespasser, the next a rattlesnake(36)”. It seems as if the Santa Ana winds create visions and thoughts of fearful and overwhelming ideas. The neighbor had not physically seen the rattlesnake or a trespasser because he says he “heard” them. His mind makes him believe they are there and it is difficult to ignore something your mind knows so clearly. The winds affect people so much that it comes to the point where people go to the doctors and complain “about headache and nausea and…

    • 360 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    As the narrator begins to describe the snow, they present it in a cheerful manner. Through the “pleasure” of the snow, it puts in place the setting of the snow as a delightful site. In the hypophora, it leads the reader to experience it, almost forcing them to like the snow. However, in the following antithesis, the astonishment of snow is compared to the “mythical creatures.” The introduction of the supernatural characters creates a tone shift, making the scene unrealistic and almost too good to be true. The narrator is unbelieving of the situation and in complete awe. Nevertheless, when the “snow [falling] in Mexico,” it creates a shift in tone. The compound separated by the semicolon distinguishes the conflicting point of views concerning…

    • 159 Words
    • 1 Page
    Good Essays
  • Good Essays

    Farther on in the chapter when the storm finally breaks, a very menacing atmosphere is created. The tension keeps rising throughout the passage as it nears the death of Simon- though the build up of events and grotesque descriptions of the boys' actions and the environment around them. One of the ways in which Golding depicts a menacing atmosphere is through consistent and vivid descriptions; for example, when the boys have "a wave of restlessness" that made them "swaying and moving aimlessly". Here, the author is using the verb 'swaying' and the verb 'aimlessly' which are both associated with the wind to describe the boys' movement. Consequently, this is a surprisingly powerful effect given as it makes the boys' seem as if a supernatural force…

    • 360 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Good Essays
  • Better Essays

    ‘then the breeze...bowed heads’ – these four lines show the wind becoming stronger but the simile of so many bowed heads make the tone religious, as if praying to a higher power. ‘Swelling’ x2 shows the power of nature. It creates a sense of drama and humans/nature being in accord. ‘And a voice in the wind whispered:’ – the tone is reverential now, serious: for such an important event, why is there nobody to record and remember it? This changes the tone of the poem and it becomes sad as nobody can answer.…

    • 910 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Better Essays