The City in Literature- Topic 3

The character in Joan Didion’s “Goodbye to All That” holds New York City on a pedestal of supreme and insurmountable excellence. A young, innocent girl from the West Coast, she could only fantasize ideas of the city based on the scant facts she knew about it:

But to those of us who came from places where no one had heard of Lester Lanin and Grand Central Station was a Saturday radio program, where Wall Street and Fifth Avenue and Madison Avenue were not at all places but abstractions (“Money,” and “High Fashion,” and “The Hucksters”), New York was no mere city. (231)

New York held a fictitious role in her mind: a happy place that she could visit only in her head because nothing so spectacular could actually exist in the real world. Once she finally gets to the city, she throws herself into it expecting a never ending stream of the excitement she always imagined. She gets it, but with the excitement comes “despair” which isn’t so dreamlike (237). She learns that New York can be that happy place she always envisioned, but with the dream comes harsh reality.