Santaland Diaries David Sedaris Analysis

In his essay Santaland Diaries that was aired on NPR, David sedaris wanted to accomplish two things. First was spoof the structure and tone of exposes and create an audience for his work, because although he had had slight success in his earlier stories he needed a breakthrough to get him started. In order to accomplish these goals Sedaris included repetition, hyperbole, dark humor, innuendos, and understatements to create an essay that would entertain the audience of his NPR broadcast and get them interested in more of his work.

In the beginning when Sedaris is talking about the training process of the different types of elf. In his satire of an expose he sets up the situation up Jungle-esc, where he is the inside man learning all about the people and things that go on inside the walls of Macy’s Santaland. When he is talking about his training in the many jobs that elf will have to undertake, he uses repetition in the sentence, “you can be an entrance elf, a water cooler elf, a bridge elf, train elf, island elf, magic-window elf, usher elf, cash-register elf or exit elf.” Sedaris’ reason for using this repetition is make the job of being a Macy's elf

He talks about how once a child starts crying, the parents will do anything (Including publicly beating their child right then and there) to make them stop so that they can remember that “Everything [was] exactly the way it should be, that everything [was] snowy and wonderful.” This is a very powerful observation, and is very purposely included at the end of the essay because it acts as a final nail in Santalands coffin. His very well explained and reasonable dislike in an essay where he is not very serious about any actual message stands out so as to not seem petty by complaining about just a bad job that he had, but rather actual reasonable fauts to dislike