Biography Essay

"Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; / Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world." These lines and the William Butler Yeats poem from which they come hold a special fascination for Joan Didion which is reflected in her fictional work. Her protagonists are women whose interior worlds resemble nothing so much as the arid, tortured landscapes which surround them. They feel anguish, yet they do not know why. What has fallen apart is meaning and moral responsibility. Like Nathanael West, Didion pictures the emptiness of the American dream, the cultural sickness, the uncomprehending despair. Her characters are so traumatized by experience they float through life as in a dream, or, more accurately, a nightmare, conscious only of stray, apparently unrelated details. Unable to achieve anything approaching self-respect, they exist within a private hell, albeit in sunny California or South America, numbed or indifferent to the pain...