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Summary Of Pacific Distance By Joan Didion

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In her essay “Pacific Distances” author Joan Didion writes about the randomness and lack of meaning in the car culture of southern California. Her implied thesis is that people in Los Angeles spend their time “in transit,” leading unreal lives without meaning or a sense of connectedness to anything, even other people. She conveys her thesis to the reader through expressive writing and unusual word choices, and she employs description and narration to create a sense of emotional deadness and random motion.
Didion’s primary purpose is expressive. The personal pronoun does not appear until the last few sentences of her essay, but when it finally does we realize that the narrator has been Didion herself, driving through Los Angeles on streets “devoid of meaning to the driver,” in which “[c]onventional information is missing.” Although the emotions presented in expressive writing are usually intense, Didion gives the reader a sense of her emotional deadness; her lack of emotion is itself an emotional state, and she presents that emotionless quality to the reader in such a way that even the “I” is suppressed until the essay’s last few sentences.
Secondarily, Didion’s purpose is literary. To some extent her language and the way she presents her thesis are at least as important as what she has to say. Her unusual word choices help the reader to understand the strangeness of life in Los Angeles: Some people feel “a seductive unconnectedness” in the city, while in other people the

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