Joan Didion’s essay, “Los Angeles Notebook”, supplies the reader with an ominous depiction, created by the uneasy tone and contrast of the Santa Ana’s with everyday life. This is done masterfully through Didion’s use of powerful imagery, and relation of mundane detail, coupled with ethos, to convey how to mechanistic winds affect the life around her. In a swift fashion, Didion is able to portray the uneasy and unnatural characteristics of the Santa Ana winds to support her claim that “to live with [such winds] is to accept unconsciously or consciously a deeply mechanistic view of human behavior.” To properly convey this, Didion uses intense and descriptive imagery. Didion’s word choice created an ominous setting for the Santa Ana winds. The words “screaming”, “eerie”, and “surreal” in paragraph two were used to convey the uneasiness the Santa Ana winds bring; it is like a fog of disorganization and chaos covers the city as the Santa Ana’s pass over. Descriptors such as “uneasy” and “unnatural” used in the opening sentence immediately allow the reader to grasp the effect of such a dangerous force of nature on society. The use of imagery…show more content… Such selection of detail, and its drastic change, includes attending a gathering. The persistent, malevolent winds are said to turn “meek little wives [into ones who would] feel the edge of the craving knife and study their husbands neck.” And then, “anything can happen. That was the kind of wind it was.” The shift of sentence structure to one of a matter-of-fact manner portrays the blunt impact of such powerful winds; the short, swift sentences mimic the swift nature of the winds, and the small amount of time they take to draw out madness hidden within the “meek little wives”, and all like
