Joan Didion Marrying Absurd Essay

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Short Joan Didion Essay
Joan Didion Marrying Absurd Essay Summary

Joan Didion Marrying Absurd Essay Graphic Organizer

Marrying Absurd

Joan Didion’s essay entitled “Marrying Absurd” tells about how marriages in Las Vegas are conducted. She narrated that Las Vegas weddings can be celebrated anytime the couple wishes to have it. All that one need is for the bride to be eighteen years old, the groom to be twenty one and a five dollar for the license. Joan Didion’s essay “Marrying Absurd” is a comical review of Las Vegas and its wedding business. It gives the reader a more in depth look at the things they always expected were happening in Nevada but were never concerned enough about to do the research. Sandra Carvalho. Blog #6 Prompt “Marrying Absurd” an essay by Joan Didion When I think about the word “tradition” a lot of different things come to mind. I think about how we have lost a lot of our hereditary traditions that were passed on from many generations.

December 11, 2007

Tradition to me is like a family or cultural ritual, that either always happens the same way or on the same day. Like a family get-together for every thanksgiving, when no matter how far or long the journey is, family comes home for a holiday tradition. Tradition also to me can mean the way that everybody expects something to be. Like a bride who wears a red dress instead of white, going against the assumption the bride is always dressed in white. I think friends now a day with all the crazy stuff people do create their own traditions. For a couple of years it was a tradition for me to go to Mexico for spring break.

Short Joan Didion Essay

In Joan Didion’s essay Marrying Absurd, Didion writes about a trip that she took to Las Vegas. Focusing mainly on the chapel industry, and how the act of getting married in Las Vegas has seemed to lose all meaning. But what really brings meaning to someone I think is tradition. Marriage has a certain tradition to it, and throughout the essay Didion illustrates well how all tradition of marriage has seemed to vanish in Las Vegas.

Joan Didion Marrying Absurd Essay Summary

Didion opens the essay with a the age requirements of applicants, and hours available to receive a marriage license, which is available on holidays for an additional charge. “There are nineteen such weddings chapels in Las Vegas, intensely competitive, each offering better, faster, and, by implication, more sincere services than the next” Didion writes. Like everything else exploited in Las Vegas, the act of marriage with family present and meaning behind it, is expelled from the picture with the goal of performing a service and collecting a dollar. Didion also wrote, “But Las Vegas seems to offer something other than “convenience”; it is merchandising “niceness,” the facsimile of proper ritual.” Only in Las Vegas can you not only find marriage 24 hours a day 7 days a week, but have Elvis perform the ceremony.

In conclusion I think Joan Didion does a good job of displaying how tradition has left the wedding chapel industry in Las Vegas. From marrying people in three minutes, to renting witnesses, to twenty-four hour availability, marriage in Las Vegas has become an industry. With each chapel trying to out do the one across the street, offering “free lobster dinner with marriage.”The essay in my opinion does a good job of describing the marriage industry in Las Vegas and how it has seemed to have lost all thoughts of traditional marriage.

In Joan Didion's , 'Marrying Absurd', she is criticizing the wedding ceremonies held in Las Vegas, Nevada. According to Didion, she feels that ' this geographical implausibility reinforces the sense that what happens there has no connection with 'real' life'. In clearer terms, Didion feels that marriges in Las Vegas are not the typical wedding ceremonies everyone should engage in, they are sosme sort of imaginative idea that should be taken seriously. The act of marriage should be taken seriously and is nothing to be toyed with. Didion also uses clear examples of how Las Vegas is a ' place in the eye of the beholder and is stimulating to the eye and an interesting place'. In the thesis of the essay, ' What people who get married in Las Vegas actually do expect- what, in the largest sense, their 'expectations' are- strikes one as a curious and self-contradictory business. Las Vegas is the most extreme and allegorical of American settlements, bizarre and beautiful in it's venality and in its devotion to immediate gratification'. This is saying that the people who get married in Las Vegas have their expectations to high and Las Vegas is only a place to stimulate the imagination. So, what does this say about the people who get married in Las Vegas and they take their wedding plans seriously? Well, according to Didion, you are confused in many ways.