Joan Didion On Self Respect Summary

Joan Didion, the author of On Self Respect, claims that self-respect demonstrates a display once called character; she also argues that the ability to sleep well at night depends on self-respect. Namely, one who realizes that the choices and the actions he/she had made have brought his/her today, has self-respect. Considering Didion’s arguments and personal, real-life examples, self-respect must have at least some influences on physical behaviors.

To begin with, according to Joan Didion, people living with self-respect and self-confidence, reveal certain qualities: toughness and a kind of moral nerve. In other words, those people do not regret choices and actions already made and taken, but rather recognize that they have responsibility for

This quote clearly demonstrates the relationship between physical behavior and self-respect. That is, the ability to sleep easily at night indicates self-respect, if not directly related, since one without self-respect would be busy ruminating on his/her misfortune. This behavior, sleeping well at night, represents a behavior with self-respect in both good and bad ways. The statement does not clearly state any information about things one had done before sleeping. But, probably, most people would presume that it doesn’t matter whether one did a bad or good thing, because once figures out his/her identity and reconciles actions with self-conscience, one would merely sleep more easily at

She compares the two careless who seem equally improbable candidates for self-respect: Julian English in Appointment in Samarra and Jordan Baker in The Great Gatsby; Jordan Baker had a self-respect, while Julian English didn’t and committed suicide. An incurably dishonest, Jordan Baker once said in The Great Gatsby, “It takes two to make an accident”. To wit, she justified what she had done (primarily bad) by recognizing that not only in car accidents, in which it is more often than not one person’s fault, but also in a relationship, two people have to involve. If Jordan Baker didn’t have self-respect, just like Julian English, she would not sleep, to say nothing of caring about how other people would think of her. Rather, knowing the price of things, she stands as a great example of person with self-respect having the courage of one’s mistakes. Also, Jordan Baker, unlike Daisy in The Great Gatsby, a fool with money who married a rich man, bewitched by the sensual voice of money at the moment, will probably cut off the ring of same miseries