Analysis Of Stories In Order To Live By Joan Didion

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Didion’s prose insistently returns to the idea that our political and social categories are no longer representing us, but instead producing the world that we live in.
“Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing.” (Joan Didion, Slouching towards Bethlehem, p. 67).
Her collection of essays, Slouching towards Bethlehem, belong to her nonfiction work published under the title of We tell ourselves stories in order to live, which offers her personal narrative construction of reality as that of a survivor from …show more content…

Didion´s personal narrative technique shifts from the singular pronoun “I” to “you”, when addressing the reader asking for complicity, and even to the plural pronoun “we” when she is referring to herself as part of a community. The relevant pronoun usage through her work systematically expresses different types of personal relationships between the author and the reader. The pronominal deixis: I/you/we are explained by Roger Fowler as a reference to the orientation of a text in relation to time, place, and personal participants (Roger Fowler, Linguistic Criticism, p.79).
Didion was aware of the use of the plural ideological structure which is more interesting for the reader, particularly when the different aspects or ideologies founded in the text are in conflict. She makes use of polyphony, which according to Bakhtin is primarily a relationship between the author´s and the characters ‘point of view, in order to illustrates and also applies a critical view to language.
Therefore as readers, we do need to focalize in order to distinguish alternative viewpoints from which her story might be …show more content…

Furthermore, it is also the telling and not simply the stories that help Didion to find her “first person narrative” in new contexts and critical manifestations (self-involvement).

According to the French semiotician Roland Barthes: “ As soon as a fact is narrated no longer with a view to acting directly on reality but intransitively, that is to say, finally outside of any function other than that of the very practice of the symbol itself, this disconnection occurs, the voice loses its origin, the author enters into his own death, writing begins […] The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author 'confiding' in us”.
As the analysis of the text below demonstrates , Didion´s narrative voice and her multiple points of views picture herself as author in two totally opposite ways : as a reporter versus as a autobiographer. Furthermore, reading Didion is not about a single voice meaning, but it can also be considered as a multiple code narrative exercise. Identify the style of her essays is the next step to achieve in this

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