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The Human Experience With The Santa Ana Wind By Joan Didion

476 Words2 Pages

Throughout the opening paragraphs of Joan Didion’s essay there is a detailed description of the human experience with the Santa Ana winds. This description demonstrates a distinct feeling and point of view towards the natural disaster known as the Santa Ana winds. Her writing describes several interactions and reactions to the wind allows the reader to understand the relationship between the Santa Ana winds and human beings. Overall Didion’s diction along with the use other stylistic elements clearly conveys her feeling of anxiety towards the winds. In the first paragraph of the text Joan Didion uses words such as “uneasy” , “unnatural stillness” , and “tension” to introduce the reader to the feelings of those who live in the vicinity where this disaster hits. These words suggest an abnormal feeling that occurs when the wind comes about. After the introduction of the anxious feeling she uses imagery in the following paragraph to allow us to further understand her emotions. When she states, “... and one woke in the night troubled not only by the peacocks …show more content…

She writes , “My only neighbor would not come out of her house for days… her husband roamed the place with a machete. One day he would tell me that he heard and trespasser, the next a rattlesnake”. This gives readers a close view of what is happening by showing her neighbors paranoia towards the wind, hindering her from going outside for several days. Joan Didion goes further into the lives of her neighbor by describing the effect it had on her husband. The wind causes the husband to become defensive because of his anxiety, and along with becoming defensive he makes up reasons for doing so. His reasoning changes from day to day, demonstrating that his anxiety also keeps him from having a steady mindset in terms of why he is feeling this

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Since it is ending, she switches from writing for the connection of the audience’s emotions, to providing actual information about the effects of the behavioral change. This is done in the last section by Didion to prove she did the research on why the storm affects people in Los Angeles and is not just giving her personal opinion. Therefore she switches from using emotionally sensitive words to more scientific words. For example in the first several sentences of the last section she states “ I did not know there was any basis for the effect… in which science bears… There is a number of persistent….

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