Student Question
What are Joan Didion's rhetorical strategies in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" and how successful is her argument?
Quick answer:
Didion's strategy in "Slouching Towards Bethlehem" is to report, in a "slice of life" fashion, little details about her time in San Francisco and the people she meets. While this gives the essay a certain kind of credibility, readers should also bear in mind that Didion is not objective.
Didion's approach in the essay is to concentrate on concrete detail and specific experiences she had during her time in San Francisco in the spring of 1967. She does not have an explicit argument in her piece; she does not editorialize, or use her position as author to pass judgement on the events she records. Instead, she lets the details speak for themselves, and relies on the reader to drawn their own conclusions.
In an Aristotelian sense, Didion's essay could be considered a "logos" kind of argument, in that she appears to be reporting actual incidents. This lends the writing a kind of "you are there" quality that is compelling, but also potentially misleading. First, Didion is not an impartial witness, and acknowledges as much by including herself as a character in the story. Second, she has chosen and arranged her material in such a way as to create particular...
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emotional responses in the reader, as when she chooses to end the piece with the description of the neglected three year old who is burned in a fire. Third, she is very conscious of her own ethos in the piece; she is viewed as a "media poisoner" by some of the people she meets, but welcomed by others. She is both participating in the scene and separate from it.
This is not to say that she is unsympathetic to the people she meets. Often, her tone is comic, or compassionate; her discussion of drug use, and the practical considerations that go into, say, preparing to drop acid, as she writes about them, reveal a desire to understand these things in all their human complexity. She clearly shows drug use to be destructive and dangerous, but also shows how drugs become a vital means of connection between people and concrete way of opting out of society at large. To the extent that Didion is exhibiting any "critical reasoning," I'd say that she sees her piece as a kind of representation of the real issue behind the youth culture, which is the fragmentation of American society and the desire for some sort of "real" relation to other people.