Resilience In The Street And Los Angeles Notebook

To strengthen resilience, we need to exercise it like a muscle. But to what extent should we exercise resilience and what happens to human emotional wellbeing when the fatigued muscle is overworked? In Anne Petry’s novel, The Street, and Joan Didian’s essay, “Los Angeles Notebook”, the authors both use literary devices to show how adversity can affect people; however, Petry uses imagery of debris, diction that evokes a sense of frustration, and personification that shows the resilience of humans in times of intense, short-term adversity, while Didian uses Imagery that incites an ominous mood, Pathetic fallacy, and syntax that shows how drastically repeated, prolonged adversity can affect people.

Petry shows, through the use of imagery, that garbage and debris can symbolize the hardship that each person encounters. She demonstrates this when describing the conflict that the people had with the

The author introduces the approaching storm: “There is something uneasy in the Los Angeles air this afternoon, some unnatural stillness, some tension”. Describing the weather as unnaturally still, having tension, and being uneasy, indicates the people’s response to the anticipated storm. She continues describing the storm’s violence as well as the people’s violence stating how an attorney “shot and killed his wife, their two sons, and himself” and how a divorcée was “murdered and thrown from a moving car”. Meanwhile, “the San Gabriel fire was still out of control, and the wind in town was blowing eighty miles an hour”. The storm causes chaos in the environment as well as in the people. The paralleled behavior of the storm and the people reveals that humans are mechanistic. So when storm is causing horrific environment events, the people are breaking as well in mechanistic responses to the