Essay Questions

How does Joan Didion exploit intertextuality? - “On Self-Respect”

Joan Didion writes, “ Jordan took her own measure, made her own peace, avoided threats to that peace: "I hate careless people," she told Nick Carraway. "It takes two to make an accident."Like Jordan Baker, people with self-respect have the courage of their mistakes. They know the price of things. If they choose to commit adultery, they do not then go running, in an access of bad conscience, to receive absolution from the wronged parties; nor do they complain unduly of the unfairness, the undeserved embarrassment, of being named correspondent.” Jordan Baker is manifestly drawn from The Great Gatsby to accentuate the quintessence of self-respect. Although Baker engrosses in deceitful activities that would be injurious to her standing, she depicts extensive self-respect for taking responsibility for her actions instead of ascribing it to other parties. This affirmative portrayal of Jordan Baker edifies the reader about the mutual exclusivity between repute and self-respect. Baker capitalizes on her peace because she embraces massive self-respect.

Explain the connotation of the Religious Allusion applied during Gordon Miller’s funeral. - “Some dreamers of the Golden Dream.”

Didion writes, “Some 200 mourners heard Elder Robert E. Denton of the Seventh-Day Adventist Church of Ontorio speak of ‘the temper of fury that has broken among us.’ For Gordon Miller, he said, there would be ‘no more death, no more heartaches, no more misunderstandings.’…Elder Fred Jensen asked ‘what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world , and lose his soul.” The elders’ religious allusions underscore the Seventh- day Church’s overt viewpoint on bereavement. Precisely, Elder Jensen’s assertion proposes a concealed inkling that Lucille Miller has misplaced her soul considering that she is a murderess who had awaited to “gain the whole world” after her partner’s expiry.