Didion's Los Angeles Notebook

Didion's narrative technique in "Los Angeles Notebook" describes a wind that is sweeping across the Los Angeles air. This wind is not like any other wind. It causes a change in character of the people and in the environment, creating tension and an unnatural stillness. Didion's use of imagery conveys an eerie mood. Through imagery, She voices, her "neighbor would not come out of the house for days, there were no lights on at night and her husband roamed the place with a machete." People's actions are changed and they have murderous and unusual characteristics that come about when the Santa Ana winds begin to blow. Her diction tells how people who live with the Santa Ana accept the odd workings of human behavior when its winds haunt the Los Angeles air. The Santa Ana creates feelings even the people themselves do not understand. Didion applies active verbs that stirs paranoia because

it conveys that the events are happening now.

She illustrates,"The baby frets. The maid sulks." It ignites an atmosphere of worry and concern as Didion's mood of an ominous darkness thickens.

The passage goes on to narrate that the Santa Ana winds turns out to be a case in which "sciences bears out folk wisdom". The Santa Ana is a foehn wind which happens on a specific slope of a mountain and changes temperature as it glides down the mountain then turns into a hot dry wind. Didion's ambiguity makes known that doctors believe that people tend to overreact when people state they suffer from "nervousness", "depression" and other insignificant symptoms. Doctors think these symptoms come about in people because of the belief in superstition and what is supposedly supposed to happen to human health when these winds come around. Didion creates ethos through her factual evidence as stated in the last paragraph."In Switzerland the suicide rates goes up during the foehn

wind, and in the courts of some Swiss cantons the wind is considered a mitigation get circumstance for crime." This proposes Didion knows what she is talking about and is knowledgable about these foehn winds. Moreover, the Santa Ana winds not only affects people but also the environment. She narrates from personal recollection "the pacific turned ominously glossy" and how people are awaken in the middle of the night not only by "the peacocks screaming in the olive trees but by the eerie absence of surf." The environment's differences are greatly known by people and it is a sign of the Santa Ana's presence. Didion's imagery of the surreal heat and a yellow cast of light stretched across the sky sometimes called "earthquake weather" reveals nature's reactions to foehn winds. It is a warning that something is coming and whatever it may be it is not good. Didion's use of personal recollection recognizes this point. "I recall being told...that the Indians would throw themselves into the sea when the bad wind blew." The Santa Ana is nothing to welcome but is undoubtly inevitable.