ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the way responsibility, described in the simplest terms as a mandate to follow the “code of the West”, is represented in Joan Didion fiction. The central story among those of Didion’s own childhood memories and state politics is the story of immigration, whose emblematic narrative becomes the one of the Donner-Reed Party. Didion attaches “a totemic significance” to the camellias, as the flowers “were planted locally in memory of the pioneers”. For Didion, familial loyalty as the basis for the moral code on the frontier is fundamental to Californian identity; however, it is not a new idea. Imagery is one of Didion’s ways to hint at the loss of paradise: in Maria’s father’s advice mentioned previously, overturning stones might reveal a rattlesnake. Lack of integrity, misplaced loyalty, detachment from the land, and a loss of ethical values: all these contribute to the feeling of senselessness experienced by Didion’s Californian characters.
