Santa Ana Winds In Joan Didion's The Los Angeles Notebook

In the opening paragraphs of the Los Angeles Notebook Joan Didion characterizes the Santa Ana winds using various stylistic elements. Her essay characterizes the Santa Ana winds as Controversial, Theoretic, and Catalytic. The stylistic elements Didion uses to convey these views are Diction, Logos, and Metaphors. Joan Didion exemplifies diction conveying the controversial characterization early on in the first paragraph of the essay with the following quote. “We know it because we feel it. The baby frets. The maid sulks.” This fits the controversial characterization because Didion is saying that the Santa Ana winds make people feel as if though they are troubled and suddenly feel upset and angry. The next example of this is a quote that she actually quoted from someone else, it states. “On nights like that, “Raymond Chandler once wrote about the Santa Ana, “every booze party ends in a fight.” The quotes diction shows controversy by …show more content…
“A few years ago an Israeli physicist discovered that not only during such winds, but for the ten or twelve hours which precede them, the air carries an unusually high ratio of positive to negative ions. This exemplifies the Santa Ana winds being theoretic because no one seems to know why this happens, we simply don’t know if this is a coincidence or if the winds actually cause this along with the unusual behavior that is associated with it. She also introduces the idea of Santa Ana winds being theoretic by mentioning things such as “To live with the Santa Ana is to accept, consciously or unconsciously, a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.” This quote sort of goes along with the last one as it talks about human behavior and how it is unknown why the winds influence or provoke things such as violence, bad moods, and