Joan Didion's Suspense Essay

971 Words2 Pages

Many authors create suspense to hook readers into the plot and hold an audience’s interest. Writers use this device when producing novels, plays, short stories, and screenplays. One can even create suspense when retelling an account of a personal story, like in a formal personal essay. This technique is especially applicable in a personal essay which details events in childhood or adolescence. The essayist can reflect on such events with his or her adult perspective. Yet, he or she can also neglect details in favour of creating the same tension in readers which the essayist experienced in his or her own life. Inducing suspense, much like inducing any emotion in a reader, is a difficult task which Joan Didion achieves by combining many writing techniques. Didion’s essay Goodbye to All That describes her eight-year residency in New York City. She outlines her time in New York from her arrival in the city to her psychological decline which causes her to leave. Didion relies on various techniques to create suspense in her essay. Through her use of a chronological timeline and a scarce level of detail, Didion creates suspense and interest for readers in her …show more content…

He explains that "I use the past tense not because he ever quit drinking but because he quit living. That is how the story ends for my father, age sixty-four, heart bursting, body cooling, slumped and forsaken on the linoleum of my brother’s trailer" (Sanders 733). Sanders’ choice creates a different effect than Didion’s because readers know how the story will end from its beginning. Thus, their focus throughout the essay is more on the essay’s contents and events than on the essay’s conclusion. Didion’s chronological approach to her essay gives readers a sense of suspense and allows them to follow along with her attitudes’ progression throughout the

Open Document