Joan Didion The White Album Analysis

Is it the abnormality in one’s psychology that cognizes the surroundings as an abnormal society? Or is it the abnormal society that reflects on one’s psychology to make them abnormal? Listed with descriptive examples, Joan Didion’s essay “The White Album” expressed her psychological evaluation and the social absurdity, through not just the meaning of words but also the arrangements. Never ceasing to be doubtful and skeptical on her view of the world, the first paragraph, especially, was filled with varying techniques and devices. On account of that, she attempted to reflect the purpose of this article.

“We tell ourselves stories in order to live” (11). This highly assertive slight overstatement was the prelude to the essay. Didion states that

our life depends a great deal on telling stories. This is not just writers to readers, but also one to themselves, as she later points out, “we interpret what we see,” (11) “we look or the sermon… for the social or moral lesson”(11). Through the specific style of this sentence, people receive the first impression on Didion was a person. Although it sounds bland and even desolate due to both its short length and the wording choice, the sentence, or perhaps because of that, it draws readers in. This also serves as an appropriate hook sentence that acts as a coupling device for the sentences to come.
Then the following sentences illustrate very specific images when read.

Starting from “the princess… caged in the consulate,”(11) to “the man with the candy… [leading] the children into the sea,”(11) and finally “the naked woman on the ledge out the window on the sixteenth floor,”(11) none of them show extensive usage of any of the five senses, only the basic visual images, yet it is extremely easy to draw mental images. It is possible that these images derive from our previous knowledge of the fairy tales everyone has read in their childhood or cliché scene of movies. Moreover, these three images do not relate to each other very well. Nonnegligible gaps between three images give readers confusion, as well as the feeling of lost. It is fair to presume that this is what Didion intended readers to feel as it possibly is how Didion felt when viewing the world with her eyes. Supporting this, in the twelfth passage, she wrote she is “no longer interested in whether the woman on the ledge outside the window on the sixteenth floor jumped or did not jump, or in why” (44). Such sentences in a passage far away from the initial mention bring even more confusion while backing up the argument that she intended to express her own feeling considering the description of her state seems like the skeptic thoughts progressed to the

ignorance.
Another technique that is easily recognizable in Didion’s writing would be repetitiveness of the first words of the sentences.

Many sentences start with the subject “we,” (11) and a verb following it. While the direct interpretation of the word, “we”(11) is that the subject Didion is referring to, that “tell… that it makes some difference whether the naked woman is about to commit a mortal sin or is about to register a political protest,”(11) “look for the sermon in the suicide, for the social or moral lesson n the murder of five,”(11) and “interpret what we see”(11) is not just her but everyone. However, continuous use of the same word, the same pattern, can also contain an underlying message. In this case, she attempted to create order in her writing instead of sacrificing the variation in sentences. Without the variation, the sentences and ultimately the paragraph have potential to bore readers, but in doing so, she created associability between sentences. This theory is then supported as she concludes the paragraph, that writers “[learn] to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria which is our actual experience,” (11) just like she is attempting to do, to make sense of things by organizing her thoughts, to make sense of things, to stop the shifting

phantasmagoria.
In conclusion, the first passage of “The White Album” written by Joan Didion explores how “we live entirely… by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images”(11) by playing with the arrangements of words, examples and literary devices. Fully expressing her detachment and skepticism, Didion shared the world, the “[lives],”(11) she experiences.