On Going Home Joan Didion Analysis

What is home? Home is somewhere where someone feels safe and secure. It is a place and/or a state of mind where someone can fulfill their personal needs. Vahan, the main character in Forgotten Fire, written by Adam Bagdasarian, perspective on home changes a lot during the book. In the beginning of the book Vahan is a wealthy, soft, and spoiled kid. He is a part of a very wealthy family and he even has maids to clean up and cook for him. Later, in the book Vahan turns into a kid who has to make life or death choices. Vahan has to watch his family members be murdered in cold blood, and because of that he matures and becomes someone who is very hard-headed. Vahan stays at many places where he is taught to call home. Though, Vahan still misses his home in Bilis and his family dinners.Vahan’s perspective on home changes a lot throughout the book and Vahan even wonders if he will ever have a home. Vahan realizes that home is not a physical state but a state of mind.

Everyday Use and Sula are coming of age stories. They both illustrate times in people’s lives when they have to decide to how they are going to live with their past and themselves.

Home is where the heart is, but what if home is no longer safe? Joyce Carol Oates explores this concept in her 1966 short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”. On surface level, this story appears to discuss a rebellious young girl named Connie and her confrontation with Arnold Friend, a stalker. The ending leaves the reader to assume that Arnold Friend plans to sexually assault the young girl. However, looking beyond what is initially shown, a new context can adhered to the plot. Carl Jung’s theory of archetypal patterns delves into the human psyche by analyzing its parts. According to Jung, the human mind is split into three different parts; the ego, the personal unconscious, and the collective unconscious- which can be split into many different archetypes that impact personality (McLeod). Oates uses archetypes and symbolism to show the battle of a young girl trying make her own home and identity in a world that

Society defines home as “a house, apartment, or other shelter. It is the usual residence of a person, family, or household” (“Home”). In The Glass Castle, Jeannette’s definition of home suggests that it is a place for friends, comfort, love, happiness, and financial security. However, home is a complicated topic that can be interpreted in many ways. The Glass Castle clearly describes the pessimistic attributes of home, such as a lack of support and poor parenting. However, the positive attributes of home outweigh it’s negatives in its definition; therefore home is a place where individuals feel secure financially and emotionally.

From pages 495 to 497 author Eve Tushnet wrote an essay titled “You Can Go Home Again.” This essay was about how it is okay to go home and live with one’s parents again if someone is older. First the essay brought up the opposition and what people think about when someone lives with their parents. The essay also brought forth different data and studies about older people that live at home. After that, the essay brought up good points about what living with one’s parents can do for them. The author used different elements of ethos, logos, pathos, and kairos to effectively communicate with the reader.

Home. A place where someone can feel safe, a place where someone will be able to unwind, relax, and relish the rest of their day. On the other hand, home is a place where someone dreads to go, a place where they’re petrified of what their significant other or their family member will do to them next. Routinely, they’re scared to feel the stinging sensation on their cheek, or scared to hear the harsh words spit out of someone’s mouth, or even be forced to do something that they don’t want to do. Women, children and even some men are held prisoners to someone they thought they loved. An abusers brand of “love” is not typically what some might think; in fact, an abusers symbol of “love” are bruises, broken bones, or a red mark to where their

“What is going on in these pictures in my mind?” (Didion 2). Joan Didion’s “Why I Write” provides an explanation to her perspective om writing and why she writes. Later on, she states that she writes as a way to discover the meaning behind what she is seeing. During this past semester as we wrote about dance, a heavy focus was on description and interpretation rather than contextualization and evaluation. With Didion’s philosophy in mind, we can use writing as a tool in order to discover a meaning of a particular dance piece. Throughout the semester, reading from other writers have provided helpful hints when writing about dance as we discover that by detailed description, underlying interpretations can expose themselves.

As I was growing up, I would adore going shopping and spending time with my family. But at times, my parents would do something odd and bizarre, such as talk really loud or argue with an employee. Their ridiculous actions would make me feel embarrassed and just want to stand somewhere far, far away from them. In the fictional short story “Abuela Invents The Zero”, Judith Ortiz’s main character, Constancia, feels the same way as me, humiliated. In addition, when she had to take her Abuela to church, she started to pray really loud and make a fool out of herself. At that moment, she just wanted for her grandmother to go away. In the end, Abuela is infuriated and enraged at Connie for treating her so incompetently. Because we both had similar experiences and thoughts, we both learned the same moral. Unlike the way we both acted, family should be valued because it is more important than pride.

The word “home” is mentioned 138 times throughout Keeper N’ Me. It discusses foster homes, homelessness, Garnet’s many homes, other people’s homes and the home Garnet never thought he would find. There is a difference between a home and a house. The difference isn’t always clear to find, unlike the phrase “home is where the heart is” finding your home can be quite difficult if you don’t know where your heart lies. When Garnet joins Lonnie and his family you could say that his heart laid with them but eventually we learn that their home was not where he belonged no matter how invested his heart was in their family. Through Garnet’s struggles and success of finding his real home, Richard Wagamese outlines the importance of people having a home.

Imagine you are walking in a city, and amongst the crowded street, you notice a man. He isn’t walking, just sitting down out of sight. He doesn’t make a sound. However, he stands out the most out of everyone else. As you pass you see a cardboard sign with the writing asking for money in the corner of your eye. In addition, to his unpleasant smell, long beard, and messy hair it seems he is invisible. So many people pass by him still they walk on with their day as if nothing even happened. They just look at him with either pity or disgust, and even both. Often times, people experience things in their life that often force them to lose everything and live out on the streets, or many times it is by choice that they live on the streets. Frequently, we just pass by people and look down on them since they have no home; but who is to say they don’t have a home? Home is not the house you live in or the country you belong to. It is a place that incites certain feelings and those feeling are what makes a place home. The people on the streets with no “home” may simply find that anywhere in the world is where they call home. Home has two specific set of values that make it more than just a place which are privacy, and safety.

Have you ever felt safe somewhere, but realized your only protection was ignorance? In Jacqueline Woodson’s When a Southern Town Broke a Heart, she introduces the idea that as you grow and change, so does your meaning of home. Over the course of the story, Woodson matures and grows older, and her ideas about the town she grew up in become different. When she was a nine year old girl, Woodson and her sister returned to their hometown of Greenville, South Carolina by train. During the school year, they lived together in Downtown Brooklyn, and travelled to. Once Jacqueline has tasted the sweet life of freedom and privilege in New York, she realizes how ignorant she was about Greenville. Her Grandmother had been protecting her from the racism and segregation that permeated the town like a disease. Through metaphor and character growth, it seems obvious that Woodson is trying to convey the theme that perceptions of home can grow and changes as one grows older.

How do you describe the characteristics and requirements of a real “home”? In the Poisonwood Bible, by Barbara Kingsolver, the outspoken and bold character known as Leah Price experiences a major rift between her family and former American homelife that leads her to transfer her obsessions over acceptance by her father to the conflict within the Congo and her lover, Anatole. Leah’s failure to receive the approval from her father through religious excellence and prestige along with the death of her youngest sister, Ruth May, led her to resent the ideals and oppressive hand that her father had implemented since her birth. Anatole’s evident acceptance and admiration of Leah’s individuality allowed Leah to feel fulfilled in her need for acceptance by a

Besides hope, family was the most important element that strived them through the hard times. It was the mean of survival and without each other, the Joads would have never been able to get to California. It tells us that family is a commodity that shouldn’t be given up on. As the book is read through, it is noticeable that Ma Joad is the one who always tries to keep the family together and is willing to accept new members to join the family. For example, Ma says “we don’t want you to go’way from us. It ain’t good for folks to break up.”(ch.16, 165) tells us that no matter the circumstances, the family will always stick together and find a different solution to the

One way Woodson starts to convey the theme is when early in the story she brings up what “home” was to her when she was young. How Woodson thinks about what her home is to her changes when the reality that has been hidden from her while being a little kid is revealed at age 9. According to the author when talking about “home” she says, “Because for me South Carolina had always been home. Even years after my family joined the Great Migration and my mother moved us from Greenville to Brooklyn, each summer we returned to the southern town of my mother’s childhood.” (1). The quote is saying that

Throughout the article “On Going Home” written by Joan Didion she describes the contradictions of home. Didion uses various rhetorical strategies throughout her piece to support her claims of what home entails. The sense of home portrayed in the article is something of a deranged expectancy that still holds out hope for perfection. Though Didion loves her home and her family she finds it a struggle to balance her individual life with her family and her heritage. In the article “On Going Home’ Joan Didion uses the rhetorical strategies of personal anecdotes and pathos to enforce her claim that home is a necessary yet cumbersome responsibility.