Slide One (Rhetorical Triangle)

Slide One (Rhetorical Triangle): Message: Joan Didion lost her husband, while her daughter is sick in the hospital. The book is her memoir on the grief she went through post-loss. “ John Gregory Dunne… [experienced] …a sudden massive coronary event that caused his death. Our only child, Quintana, had been the previous five nights unconscious in an intensive care unit…This is my attempt to make sense of the period that followed” (Didion 7). Didion establishes the situation and goes on with the account of her life before and after the tragedies. Audience: Didion writes to anyone who has ever lost a loved one. Anyone who can relate to the grief of losing someone so close to one. Communicator: Didion is an acclaimed writer. She has won many awards. She won the National Book Award for The Year of Magical Thinking. “I have been a writer my entire life… even as a child…the way I write is who I am, or have become” (Didion 7). Didion uses her credibility as an author to explain why she is writing the book. She goes on to say she had a sense that meaning was within words, but also that she needed more than words to find the meaning. Didion now uses words to find the meaning of her tragedy, to make sense of it, not as a writer creating a work, but as the reader, analyzing the text.

Slide Two & Three(Pathos, Logos, and Ethos): Pathos: Didion employs pathos greatly in her novel, primarily because the novel is about her grief and her emotional recollection of what happened. Didion adopts language that inspires compassion and suffering in the reader. Pathos is generally used to manipulate the reader, and it does, but in this case, it is not used to persuade or manipulate. Pathos is used so that the reader can identify with the writer. For this kind of writing, pathos is both appropriate and effective. Didion mainly uses pathos. When asked about an autopsy, Didion says, “ I had to believe he was dead all along. If I did not believe he was dead all along I would have thought I should have been able to save him” (Didion 22). Whether the reader has lost a loved one or not, he can immediately identify with feelings of guilt and uselessness when a problem arises. Didion is recalling time she spent with her husband and she says: “He mentioned those afternoons with the pool and the garden and Tenko several times during the year before he died” (Didion 25). Didion is explaining how she should have known that her husband was going to die. She feels guilty for not recognizing the signs. It makes the reader identify with her pain. The reader feels sympathy for her.

Logos: Didion also blends logos into the novel. One would think that pathos and logos cannot coexist, but Didion achieves it smoothly. During the retelling of her life, she refers to psychologists, writers, and witnesses from happenings that relate to hers, friends of the family, books, as well as other professionals. They are facts that have to do with grief versus sorrow, death, how widows react, etc. Also regarding the autopsy Didion states: “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” (Didion 20). Didion uses many sources throughout her book to give a more factual, professional tone to her otherwise emotional statements. That way she achieves a balance between pathos and logos. When referring to the grief she was experiencing she says, “I also learned from this literature, two kinds of grief…such uncomplicated grief, according to The Merck Manual, 16th Edition, could still typically present with ‘anxiety symptoms such as initial insomnia’” (Didion 48). Didion refers to professional works to refer to what she is feeling. She does this so that it gives her statements a serious tone. She wants the reader to know that what she is going through is real, not a hallucination from a grieving person. When she uses a psychologist or a medical journal as a source, it makes her emotions more concrete.

Ethos: Didion also uses a bit of ethos. Didion assumes that the reader knows she is a successful writer, but she alludes to some of her, and her husband’s works. She alludes to writing screenplays, going to award’s ceremonies, and having interviews with magazines. She alludes to jobs she and her husband were assigned to. She says that she always liked to find facts, to go to books. That is why she cites from so many outside sources in her memoir. But, she uses those sources to prove or explain what she was feeling at the time. Didion also shows a level of knowledge about medicine and death slightly higher than the average person’s. “There was a photograph of John and me taken on location for The Panic in Needle Park. It was our first picture. We went with it to the Cannes Festival…we were traveling first-class on Twentieth Century-Fox” (Didion 72). Didion establishes her credibility as a writer. She lets the reader into her life by doing that. She is sharing her grief, her life, her happy times with her husband, and her accomplishments. “There was a photograph of John and me and Quintana on the deck of the house we had in Malibu in the 1970s. The photograph appeared in People” (Didion 72). Again Didion shows her accomplishments as a writer. She talks about her acclaim as a writer by appearing in a magazine as popular as People. One would think Didion was trying to show off, but really she is establishing her credibility so that one will seriously consider what she has to say. Similarly to logos, Didion does not want the reader to assume that the book is the emotional ranting of a hurt woman. The work is a serious, intellectual novel, even if it appeals to the human heart and emotions.