In “Slouching Towards Bethlehem,” Joan Didion describes the fragmentation of the nation's youth in the 1960s. The essay's title, which is also the title of the collection in which it appears, is from the last line of Yeats's “The Second Coming.” Didion claims in the preface to her collection that certain lines from the Yeats poem have “reverberated” in her “inner ear”: “the widening gyre, the falcon which does not hear the falconer, the gaze blank and pitiless as the sun.” These images are Didion's only points of reference, the only pattern that makes sense of what she is observing in the world.

The falling apart, the collapsing center, the spiraling gyre—the falcon out of control, unable to hear the falconer—are recurrent motifs in Democracy. The internal drama of the novel, the love story of Inez Victor and Jack Lovett, is set against the historicity of the Vietnam War, and Didion uses the pattern of the gyre to illustrate the simultaneous collapse into disorder of both the internal fictive world and the external factual world which impinges on the novel.

In his annotation to “The Second Coming,” Yeats claims that history, like the mind, takes the form of two vertical intersecting cones which spin in opposite directions: one narrowing, one widening. The end of an age is marked by one gyre reaching its greatest expansion and the other its greatest contraction. The revelation that approaches takes its shape from the movement of the inward gyre and begins its spiral outward, unraveling the “thread” of the previous age, “all things dying each other's life, living each other's death.” As Thomas Whitaker suggests, the apocalypse for Yeats is nothing more than “a full rendering of the opposites” within the world and the self. The revelation will be a “lightning flash” but paradoxically will strike in more than one place and occur for some time as the next era succeeds its antecedent. The next age, while reversing the previous age, still repeats past eras within itself. History, then, is cyclical. Yeats claims that in the present day the gyre is nearing its widest expansion.

The gyre as a pattern in Democracy becomes clear when one establishes the novel's time frame. The novel begins during the last weeks before the fall of Saigon in March 1975 and ends at an unspecified time after March 1976. Within this span, the novel moves back and forth between 1952 and 1975—although it does leap as far back as 1934 in another story that begins, “Imagine my mother dancing.” The novel, however, does not operate by the standard use of flashback. Didion once claimed that in her first novel, Run River, she wanted to have “the past and present operating simultaneously,” but she wasn't “accomplished enough to do that with any clarity” （Writers at Work）. In Democracy, she succeeds in creating the illusion of simultaneity, and this technique adds to the elusiveness of the novel, thus heightening the reader's sense of disorder.

Within this elusive world, however, Didion hints that there might be “tenuous connections,” cycles in which the past is relived in the present time of the novel. In 1952 Jack catches lobsters in the lagoon off Johnston; in 1975 Inez washes her bandana in the same lagoon. In 1969 her children, Jessie and Adlai, play Marco Polo in the pool at Borobudur; in 1975 Jack drowns in the same pool. In 1952 Inez walks through the graveyard at Schofield; in 1975 she buries Jack in the same graveyard. In 1946 Carol Christian's marriage deteriorates, and she later departs for San Francisco on the SS Lurline; in 1975 Inez's family collapses, and she leaves for Hong Kong. Finally, the Pacific tests of 1952 are “another dawn in another year”; in 1975 Inez's flight to Hong Kong is an “eleven-hour dawn.”

Didion also suggests a cyclical history by alluding to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five （“aloha oe” or “so it goes”）, both of which link the Vietnam War to World War II. The Hawaiian setting of the novel is also significant to this connection, for Didion claims that “war is the very fabric of Hawaii's life,” and in both of her essay collections, Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, Punchbowl Cemetery joins the two wars, where graves from World War II share the same dormant crater with fresh graves for bodies arriving from Vietnam.

Didion establishes this cyclical history in the opening sentences of the novel—for here we see the syncretism of the creation myth, the resurrection, and the prophecy （by Yeats） of the Second Coming. It is March 30, 1975, Easter Sunday, when Jack says to Inez in the lounge of the Happy Talk:

The light at dawn during those Pacific tests was something to see.

Something to behold.

Something that could almost make you think you saw God, he said.

As in the creation myth, there is light. The allusion to Christ's resurrection （Easter Sunday） emphasizes the succession of eras from the Old to the New Testament; the latter rewrites the first. The allusion to the resurrection also marks approximately A.D. 30, near the birth of Christ, which Yeats designates both in A Vision and in his annotation to “The Second Coming” as the end of Greco-Roman civilization and the beginning of the Christian era. Similar to Yeats's vision of the Second Coming, the gyre is now at its widest expansion, and anarchy is let loose upon the world with the impending fall of Saigon.

The circular pattern of the gyre also appears in the imagery of islands. In the opening chapter, Jack mentions the Philippines and Johnston Island, the Aleutians and Jakarta, “ass end＼s］ of the universe.” The islands are points of reference without a center. As the narrator suggests, “At the end of the known world there is only water, water as a definite presence.”

Yet if the islands are considered central locations, they also become part of the imagery of disappearing centers. Islands, the narrator suggests, are mutable and subject to erosion: “When a hill slumps into the ocean I see the order in it.” When an island erodes an atoll remains, a circle of reef without a center. Hence, a phrase from the last line of the novel, “where islands once were,” again signifies the vanishing center. In addition, there are other references to disappearing centers. During 1975, for the narrator （the fictive Didion） time quickens and collapses into itself the way a “disintegrating star contracts into a black hole,” and she can remember only splinters of poems by Housman, Eliot, and Schwartz. The news clips she reads in March and April are mere “dislocations,” fragments of an incomplete picture, and when she reads the breaking news of “falling capitals” in Southeast Asia she calls them instances of the “black hole effect.”

The lives of the characters also evidence this collapse. The two central characters, Inez and Jack, are not a fixed center for the novel. They are “evanescent,” “emotionally invisible,” “unattached,” “wary to the point of opacity, and finally elusive.” For the narrator, they become indefinable and seem “not to belong anywhere at all” except together. Neither the narrator nor Inez discovers Jack's real identity. The narrator suggests that a record of Jack's life would reveal “overlapping dates” and “blank spots.” Equally elusive is Inez. Temporarily obliterated from the narrator's memory, at one point she loses her individuality, developing the mechanical characteristics of media personalities: the fixed gaze, the reposeful countenance, the “frequent blink.”

Inez is part of a society of homeless jetsetters. The setting of the novel, then, appropriately sprawls across the globe from Jakarta to the mainland United States. The Victor and Christian families disintegrate. Carol Christian leaves for San Francisco. Paul Christian probably murders his daughter Janet. Adlai organizes a rally for the liberation of Saigon, while Jessie undergoes drug rehabilitation and later boards a C-5A transport to Saigon. Inez leaves Harry Victor and flies to Hong Kong with Jack. At the end of the novel the members of the Victor family are detached from each other, and the reader senses that this separation is more than geographic: Inez is in Kuala Lumpur indefinitely; Harry is in Brussels; Jessie is in Mexico; and Adlai is in San Francisco.

Beyond this domestic world, the historical world is fragmenting just as fast if not faster. In his paper “Internal and External Historicity in Joan Didion's Democracy,” James Wohlpart cites four major historical events that Didion uses in her novel. As Wohlpart observes, through the description of these events—the fall of Da Nang, Phnom Penh, and Saigon, along with the evacuation of a flight of orphans—Didion adds a “dimension of reality” to her novel, thereby meshing the internal fictive world with the external historical world. In addition, however, this fusion allows Didion to underscore the simultaneous collapse of both worlds. Thus, while teaching at Berkeley the narrator refers to the cities that were “falling” in Southeast Asia during the major offensive launched by the North Vietnamese. In the months of March and April the following South Vietnamese cities and American military bases fell （many without resistance）: Ban Me Thuot, March 12; Pleiku, March 16; Quang Ngai, Chu Lai, and Tam Ky, March 24; Hue, March 25; Da Nang, March 29; Nha Trang and Qui Nhon, April 1; Bien Hoa, April 19; Xuan Loc and Ham Tan, April 21; Saigon, April 29-30. In addition, the narrator refers to Ken Healy, the pilot who on March 29 made an unauthorized flight to evacuate people from the Da Nang airport. In a mad scramble women, children, and South Vietnamese soldiers mobbed the plane, crawling into the baggage compartments and wheel wells and clinging to the undercarriage. Others who could not hang on after take-off plummeted into the South China Sea.

Both Eagle Pull and Frequent Wind, which the narrator refers to in Democracy, were real operations: Eagle Pull the evacuation of the American embassy in Cambodia on April 12 and Frequent Wind the evacuation of Saigon on April 29-30. The photo of John Gunther Dean leaving the American embassy in Cambodia actually appeared on the cover of Newsweek. In the background are two shadowy figures, one of whom the narrator of Democracy believes is Jack Lovett.

Furthermore, Jessie's flight to Vietnam on “that March night” corresponds with the evacuation of Da Nang （March 28-29） in which uncontrolled rioting broke out everywhere in the city. Women were raped, cars stolen, jeeps blown up, houses looted. General Truong ordered the tanks of the South Vietnamese army onto the streets to restore order, but the soldiers joined in the looting or were afraid to face the rioters.

In Democracy the telecast of helicopters vanishing into fireballs and ditching in oil slicks off the Pioneer Contender corresponds with the Pioneer Contender's role in the evacuation of Da Nang from March 28 to April 1. The reference to “orphan” escorts corresponds with Operation Babylift, which occurred on April 5 and 6 when U.S. officials escorted orphans onto airlifts out of Southeast Asia. And Jessie's flight to Vietnam illustrates the confusion in Southeast Asia during the last few weeks before the final evacuation of Saigon. For example, between April 15 and April 28, 277 whites and blacks without identification or passports who spoke English and presented themselves as Americans at evacuation sites were evacuated without question.

The narrator describes the situation in South Vietnam as one of growing hysteria and confusion, and the collapse of the moral center heightens this rapid disintegration. The Americans were pulling out, or as Didion defines morality in one of her essays, they were leaving the body on the highway for coyotes. For example, during the evacuation of Nha Trang, Americans armed with guns prevented Vietnamese employees from boarding evacuation aircrafts, and after the United States evacuated the American embassy in Phnom Penh, President Sokham Koy stated: “The United States led Cambodia into this war … but when the war became difficult, the United States pulled out.” Finally, after the last American helicopter left Saigon, hundreds of civilians huddled on the roof of one of the buildings, an emergency helipad, and waited for more helicopters to appear.

Thus, the fragmentation of the fictive world—Inez's flight to Hong Kong—concurs with the collapse of the external world—the fall of Saigon. For the first time, Inez feels detached from her entire family. She is “not interested in them,” unable to grasp “her own or their uniqueness.” While listening to the radio in mid-April, she thinks about Jack and wonders when “it” （the final evacuation） will occur: “The world that night was full of people flying from place to place and fading in and out.” Didion's time frame remains ambiguous, leaving the reader uncertain whether “that” night is the night in mid-April or the night of the final evacuation, April 29. Here the gyre is at its widest expansion in both worlds, the fictive and the historical, and no persons, not even those who believe they have a “home to call,” are excluded from the continual movement, the shuttling back and forth, the falling apart.

Rightfully, then, the novel is told in “fitful glimpses,” for it is shaped by the external world of fragments, clippings, and repetitions （in which the chronology is obscured because of lapses in memory）, as well as by the international dateline and the mutability of islands. It is not the novel that begins “Imagine my mother dancing,” though Didion as character says such was her intention. In this case, life shapes art. Didion gives shape to disorder, while disorder shapes her novel. In the end, the options do not “decrease to zero”; instead, the scope of the novel widens, and the gaps in the text multiply. Didion finds a pattern, a falling away.

Some of these textual gaps are startling. Who is Jack Lovett? A certain “gray” area, a corpse in a body bag. How does Wendell Omura get on Janet Christian's lanai? How does the paperboy see the 357 Magnum tucked in Paul Christian's beachroll? Why does Inez agree to talk with Joan Didion? Are Inez and Jack's meetings purely circumstantial? Inez has to have a passport when she leaves for Hong Kong, doesn't she? As Didion asks, “What does that suggest? You tell me.”

Didion observes, reveals, and records, but she does not explain. Nor does she provide an answer to the questions raised by the Vietnam War. Yeats prophesies the future; Didion seeks the answer in the past. In the future, for Didion, anything can happen: “The options remain open here.”

Was there a cause for the Vietnam War? Has history turned full circle, the “past” serving as “prologue to the present“? And if history has completed a cycle, will it do so again? Does the individual affect history—“the long view”—or have people, as Harold Bloom suggests in his interpretation of Yeats, like the falconer lost control of nature? Are people, as A. Norman Jeffares argues, like the falcon being swept beyond their control away from Christ? Or are people falling beyond the mute voice of their homeland? None of these uncertainties is resolved.

Yeats attempted to account for some of the enigmas facing twentieth-century humankind. On the one hand, “The Second Coming” predicts the coming era: “Surely some revelation is at hand.” Yet it is not clear exactly what will come, for the beast—a “shape,” its gaze “blank and pitiless as the sun”—is not clearly defined. However, as Thomas Whitaker suggests, this paradox does not leave the reader uncertain, for the final lines of the poem, in which the rough beast “slouches towards Bethlehem to be born,” are spoken by one “who can maintain his questioning stance even when nearly overpowered by that image erupting from the abyss of himself and of his time.”

Similar to Yeats, faced with the inexplicability of chaos, the narrator of Democracy finds a pattern within history, but dissimilar to Yeats, the narrator of Democracy is not expectant. For the narrator as well as for Inez, there is “no revelation, no instant of epiphany.” When the reader anticipates resolution, or in the Yeatsian sense an apocalyptic “dawn,” the narrator leaves the reader without an answer. The novel is inconclusive, as the narrator indicates: “Last look through more than one door. This is a hard story to tell.”

At the end of Democracy, Didion conveys a feeling—not an answer but a “sudden sense” of flying into those “dense greens and translucent blues.” She leaves the reader with the image of the fallen center, the vanishing island. The narrator has “not been back.” As in many postmodern novels, it is the reader's prerogative to fill the space.

In summarizing John Clark Pratt's analysis of Vietnam literature, Timothy Lomperis notes that the literature of the Vietnam War does not add up to a totality. Instead, this literature consists of fragments that illustrate the multiplicity of the war: “Such a literature cannot divine the truth, but it can present fragments of it and get the reader involved in the quest.”

Given the method and mood of Democracy, I believe Didion would agree.