Life Changes In The Instant By Joan Didion

In Our Time, written by Ernest Hemingway, is a collection of short stories that were published in 1925 and defined Hemingway's writing style from there on. As a symbolic image of Hemingway himself, Nick Adams is faced with troubling relationships that ultimately define who he is. Life experiences from young to old define show how Nick lives his love before, during, and after World War One. These experiences strengthen his relationships, maturity, and masculinity.

For the first time in 130 years, more young adults are living with parents until their mid thirties. Part of this could be an emotional attachment keeping them from leaving home because after they leave, everything will change. However, many are losing their real sense of home and are just using it as a place where they can avoid paying bills and many other responsibilities. Many young adults now do not understand the extensive sacrifice it is to leave their one and only home. In “On Going Home,” Joan Didion expounds on her struggle to connect with her current house, in a nostalgic and resigned tone, and vivid imagery, symbolism, and comparison Didion expresses the regret she feels every time she remembers she left her “home”.

In her essay “On Going Home,” author Joan Didion speaks to new parents about how the experience of “going home” after starting a new family can trigger feelings of disconnection between families, old and new. Written from Didion’s own experience returning to her childhood home for her daughter’s first birthday, the essay describes her nostalgia for her previous home and how she regrets being unable to, as a mother, provide the same familial experiences she had as a child. Using relatable invention, imagery-inducing arrangement, and syntax that inspires more deliberate reading by the audience, Didion effectively convinces her readers of the familial fragmentation that occurs with the creation of a nuclear family.

Where I Was From by Joan Didion is a book written about Didion’s perspective of the history of California. Throughout the novel Didion shares her families past experiences and adventures of moving west. Didion not only shows the readers how California has changed but also how it changed her as a person as well. Particularly in “Part One”, the opening paragraph contains an abridgement history of the eventful westward journey of Didion’s pioneer family unit, focusing particularly on the women in the family and tracing vertebral column six generations the blood of her famous hemicranias. Didion makes a very unpersuasive argument in “Part one” by her ineffective use of organization but effective use of grounds and claims.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) said this famous quote at his first inaugural address, when he took one of the most important jobs in the world, becoming the president of the United States. He then went on to do what no other president had done before―be elected for more than two terms. The people elected Franklin for four consecutive terms during one of the nation’s hardest times, and he and his wife helped pull the nation to its feet. This period of World War II is captured in the biography No Ordinary Time: Franklin & Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II by Doris Kearns Goodwin. The author uses countless interviews to piece together the perspective of the home front from

The author, Leslie Fiedler writes about the differences in what it means to be normal. She discusses this in a professional manner that opens eyes to what we have disguised and even been ashamed of. “The Tyranny of the Normal,” we learn much about what we perceive as abnormal and what society seems to portray normal as. We discover what we believe is normal and also what has changed through-out the history of this subject. Our minds are opened and exposed to the world of abnormalities and how we see them.

The book their eyes were watching was written by Zora Hurston, and she tells the life story of a girl named Janie. It starts off with a metaphor explaining that women are the type to chase their dreams and even when it seems they can never accomplish it they never lose sight of it. Men on the other type to have dreams but instead of chasing like how Zora says women do they want their dream to come to them. The book is a frame narrative being and told by Zora but switches from Janie 's point of view to get a better look at her story. The reason for this book is to show the importance of dream and finding love. In the first chapter, we see Janie sitting under a pear tree and she starts to realize what she really wants to accomplish. She

Joan Didion uses parenthesis as a way to add qualifying information to a more impactful statement, which causes the reader to dismiss the parenthetical statement and focus on the first clause which Didion has chosen as a greater statement. For example, when Didion is relaying the conversation about John’s autopsy, she writes this statement, “Doctors themselves, according to many studies (for example Katz, J. L., and Gardner, R., “The Intern’s Dilemma: The Request for Autopsy Consent,” Psychiatry in Medicine 3:197—203, 1972), experience considerable anxiety about making the request,” (21). In this section, Didion wants the reader to feel the importance of her decision to allow the autopsy. She chose to do so by including how hard it must have

Published in 1997, Marie Howe’s anthology of poems, What the Living Do was written as an elegy to her brother, John, who passed away due to AIDS. Howe’s anthology is written without metaphor to document the loss she felt after her brother’s death. Although What the Living Do is written as an anthology, this collection allows for individual poems to stand alone but also to work together to tell an overarching story. Using the poetic devices of alliteration, enjambment, repetition and couplets, Howe furthers her themes of gender and loss throughout her poems in her anthology.

Ruth Whippman, a journalist for The New York Times. Besides, Whippman being a journalist, she is an author (America the Anxious and The Pursuit of Happiness) and a documentary filmmaker. In Whippman’s recent writing for The New York Times, Actually, Let’s Not Be in the Moment, she expresses the importance of mindfulness. Whippman mentions the skill on how to master mindfulness. And the only way to master this skill is by meditation, mindfulness meditation to be exact.

The Solitude of Self is a speech that was given by Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who was a leader of the women’s suffrage movement. This speech mainly discussed gender equality in every situation, including education and suffrage. Stanton clearly was opposed to the idea of inequality and believed that every person, man or woman, deserved to have the same rights.

Simone De Beauvoir in The Second Sex suggests that to resolve the tension between bad faith and authenticity, people must regard women as subjects and not objects. They must also collectively fight against the idea of womanhood in order to remain authentic to themselves.

As the novels progress, both protagonists face life changing decisions, based on their past experiences they had with the choices their own mothers had to make, they now must choose between sacrificing the ones they love, or the life which they have always dreamed. To begin, in The Bluest Eyes, Pauline’s daughter Pecola is reaching for the blackberry pie juice that is piping hot. Pecola wants to help her mother by moving the boiling juice to an area that will let it cool faster. She hopes that by doing this task, she will gain her mother’s acceptance.While doing this, the bowl slips out of Pecola’s hands and juice is spilled everywhere on the floor, including on her legs. When this happens Pauline shockingly says: “crazy fool...my floor, mess… look what you ..look what you… work...get on out...now what ...crazy...my floor, my floor... my floor” (Morrison, The Bluest Eyes, 109).

Esther Greenwood, the main character, is the most obvious comparison to Sylvia Plath herself. Esther is a troubled girl who is gifted with intelligence and scholarships to fancy schools and opportunities, but still finds herself in a pit of depression she can’t crawl out of. Both Esther and Sylvia are extremely intelligent, Sylvia being gifted with an IQ of 160. Sylvia shows her descent into depression through Esther, gradually getting worse and worse as she goes through college and realizes she has no idea what to do with her life.

Identity is who a person is or how they see themselves, but is this something they are born with or is it something they learn over time? Can this identity be changed? Or is it permanent once set? Identity is a major theme in Toni Morrison’s Sula. Scholars discuss the different identities that the characters possess, but tend to fail to mention character development or lack of character development. Character development or lack thereof is usually an important literary move in most writing. This development provides a deeper understanding of characters in addition to a deeper understanding of themes throughout the literature. Sula focuses mainly on the lives of Sula and Nel, which makes tracking their character development easier to track and observe their identity and sense of self. Identity is a major, yet easily overlooked theme in Sula.