The Loss of Narrative as Theme in Joan Didion's White Album
James Ollen-Smith, English 171, Sages and Satirists, Brown
University, 2002  In the following passage Didion describes a
loss of faith in the supposed narrative of life. She begins to
believe that events occurring around her are essentially random
and lacking in real meaning, or at best superficially arranged
and ordered.  The only problem was that my entire education,
everything I had ever been told or had told myself, insisted
that the production was never meant to be improvised: I was
supposed to have a script, and had mislaid it. I was supposed to
hear cues, and no longer did. I was meant to know the plot, but
all knew was what I saw: flash pictures in variable sequence,
images with no meaning? beyond their temporary arrangement, not
a movie but a cutting-room experience. In what would probably be
the middle of my life I wanted still to believe in the narrative
and in the narrative's intelligibility, but to know that one
could change the sense w