Barbara Lazear Ascher Rhetorical Analysis

This short story wrote by Barbara Lazear Ascher a woman who describes with explicit details her thoughts and feelings of the participants in the streets of New York. The author uses rhetoric elements such as Pathos, Logos and Ethos to convince her audience that compassion is not a characteristic trait, it is developed within ourselves. The author use rhetorical elements that appeals to Pathos to invoke sympathy from an audience. When she describes how the baby’s mother feel when she crosses the light tightening on the “stroller’s handle as she sees the man approach”. The man did not ask for money, he was just a homeless man starting at the blonde baby. The author makes the audience feel what she wants them to feel. And she question herself

She tries to cite facts of her experience as a witness when she was in a French bread shop and a man walked in the shop and the owner of the shop gives the man a cup of coffee and bread from leftovers and walks away without a word. Then the author uses the same rhetorical element Logos of asking herself “what compels this woman to feed this man? Pity? Care? Compassion? Or does she simply want to get rid of her shop of his troublesome presence? It is hard to compare whether people feel deep sympathy for another individual or it is just to avoid complains but in the author’s story she adds the word “moody” French woman which gives the owner an appearance of unpredictable changes of mood that she might have done it for having sympathetic consciousness. For personal experience, I have witness the same situation at my job in Jack in the Box. There is always a homeless man who gets in the store to protect himself from the hot weather. He does not buy anything at the store, he just stays there looking at the burgers. However, the manager sometimes gives him food because she feels sorry for the man. I believe is the sympathetic consciousness in ourselves that makes us do good deeds in our