I read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking this week. The twenty-second chapter made more of an impression on me than the twenty-one preceding it joined. Didion uses Chapter 22 for amalgamating those images she’d used throughout this story, combining each narration thread whereby they become part of one tapestry showing unity. Each image captures her when this ‘year of magical thinking’ is on the verge of ending, a point where she’s become optimistic, albeit uncertain on how to move forward.
With time’s progression, Didion realizes how each memory she has involving John will get remoter: “I know that as the days pass…things will happen. [How I saw] John at the instant [he died] will become less immediate, less raw. It will become something that happened in another year. My sense of John himself, John alive, will become more remote…softened, transmuted into whatever best serves my life without him” (Didion 225).…show more content… Through each lei getting hung within that entombment place, Didion connects each thing associated with her Hawaiian stay accompanied by John and Quintana to how symbolic a flower is. Each tectonic plate, which serves as a reminder involving each shift controlling this planet, returns for symbolizing how humans are lacking in, if not altogether devoid of, any true power. The household in Brentwood fades, providing Didion with a reminder on how each memory involving the happiest times in life disappears while we’re aging. Each image that has appeared during various intervals throughout this story coalesces there for underscoring each theme associated with memories, losses, and
