To whom or what is Joan Didion saying "good-bye" in the story "Good bye to All That"

Joan is Joan Didion, the writer, my brother’s wife. It was rare for her to call. John was always the one who made the calls. I knew by the tone of her voice that something terrible had happened.

In Joan Didion’s “Good-Bye to All That”, Didion wrote about a woman’s process of pursuing her dream which was living in New York. Throughout the passage, Didion used many rhetorical devices to establish the storyline, which enhanced the reader’s understanding of the situations. She used many metaphors to represent the reality of the character’s life and what she had hope for. She had also foreshadowed some of the objects in the story that represented something bigger.

Didion used foreshadowing to create a dramatic traction on the outcomes of the character. The foreshadowing were not easy to spot or understand.“I was late to meet someone but I stopped at Lexington Avenue and bought a peach and stood on the corner eating it and knew that I had…show more content…

The theme is normally the message the author wants the reader to understand and take in. The theme of the story started with this quote, “From my office, I could look across town to the weather signal on the Mutual of New York Building and the lights that alternately spelled TIME and LIFE above Rockefeller Plaza; that pleased me obscurely, and so did walking uptown in the mauve eight o’clocks of early summer evenings and looking at things.” (Pg. 6) The theme of this story is about time and life. It took time for the character to finally realize the things she wanted in life. She thought she wanted to live in New York and settle in. However, her time in New York wasn’t the best experience she had hope for. Her life was a mess, and she wasn’t focused on the right things she was suppose to be focusing on. Seeing the words TIME on Rockefeller Plaza, one of New York’s main attraction gave her hope again. From the beginning she believed that time would help her adapt to New York. When she first got to New York, she was young. Being young gave her opportunities and time to find jobs and work her way up. It took time for her to realize all the problems she had been living with. It took time for her to realize that Los Angeles was a place she enjoyed living in in the future. New York was a stage of time where she had to discover herself as an individual. The last sentence of the passage showed that she was happy living in Los Angeles. “There were years when I called Los Angeles “the coast,” but they seem a long time ago. (Pg. 8) Normally, people living in the east coast would call Los Angeles the coast, but it was a long time ago since she called Los Angeles the coast. This provides the reader a hint that she had settled down in Los Angeles and have been living there for a long time. It took her a long time to discover the life she wanted. New York wasn’t the one for her. It only took time for her to discover what she

there is no passage.