Rhetorical Analysis Of Elie Wiesel's Speech

In his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Elie Wiesel strives to inform his audience of the unbelievable atrocities of the Holocaust in order to prevent them from ever again responding to inhumanity and injustice with silence and neutrality. The structure or organization of Wiesel’s speech, his skillful use of the rhetorical appeals of pathos and ethos, combined with powerful rhetorical devices leads his audience to understand that they must never choose silence when they witness injustice. To do so supports the oppressors.

Elie Wiesel voiced his emotions and thoughts of the horrors done to Jewish people during World War II whilst developing his claim. Wiesel “remember[s] his bewilderment,” “his astonishment,” and “his anguish” when he saw they were dropped into the ghetto to become slaves and to be slaughtered. He repeats the words “I remember” because he and the world, especially those who suffered in the ghettos and camps, would never be able to forget how innocent suffered. Consequently, he emphasized that “no one” has the right to advocate for the dead. Like many other people in the world, he lost his family during the war.

Wiesel emphasizes the point that the holocaust impacted others to the point where they were content with death. He wanted others to know that no one should ever have to endure a terrifying situation like the holocaust or even have the thought about choosing death instead of living. World War II affected Wiesel immensely, where he thought that surrendering his life is the only option left since he was tired from all the hardships that the Nazis inflicted on the him and the Jews. By chapter 7, Wiesel said, “My mind was invaded suddenly by this realization-- there was no more reason to live, no more reason to struggle”. The audience can feel Wiesel is in pain.

To develop the theme of denial and its consequences, Wiesel uses juxtaposition and characterization. Wiesel uses juxtaposition to develop the theme of indifference and its consequences. Near the beginning of the memoir, Elie’s family is packing for their deportation to Aushwitz. There is absolute chaos, as Wiesel writes, “Bibles and other ritual objects were strewn over the dusty ground” (15). Unlike the disorder, however, Elie, on the same page, writes, “All this under a magnificent blue sky.”

In the speech, titled “The Perils of Indifference,” Elie Wiesel showed gratitude to the American people, President Clinton, and Mrs. Hillary Clinton for the help they brought and apprised the audience about the violent consequences and human suffering due to indifference against humanity (Wiesel). This speech was persuasive. It was also effective because it conveyed to the audience the understanding of

Elie Wiesel, a Romanian-born Jew who was taken to Auschwitz at age 15, was an advocate for all Jews who had lost their lives during the Holocaust. On April 12, 1999, Wiesel was invited by President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Clinton to speak at the White House as part of the Millennium Lecture series. Wiesel’s speech, titled “Perils of Indifference,” was meant to persuade the American people to not show

Being the last sentence of the book, and out of all the passages I highlighted this one stood out to me and described Wiesel’s experience in just a few simple sentence. He looked at himself for the first time in many years, and did not recognize himself he saw a different person. This showed me that the concentration camps changed him he was a different person inside and out. The events that occurred to him had scared him so much that the man he saw in the mirror wasn’t him, but one who had been drained of life that looked lifeless from the events occurred in the concentration camps. He was weak and this whole passage embodies his weakness and the whole point of the concentration camps.

Wiesel used pregnant pauses to emphasize the point he was trying to make. In his speech “Perils of Indifference”, Wiesel claimed that people ignoring terrible events occurring in the world around them are the worst. Wiesel used his speech “Perils of Indifference” to create awareness about how to be indifferent is worse than to be the enemy through his use of credibility and persona. Wiesel

By the end of his story, his diction and tone expressed true emptiness and sorrow. This is displayed by Wiesel saying “I wanted to see myself hanging on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself in the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse gazed back at me. The look in his eyes, as they stared into mine, has never left me.”

Wiesel pinpoints the indifference of humans as the real enemy, causing further suffering and lost to those already in peril. Wiesel commenced the speech with an interesting attention getter: a story about a young Jewish from a small town that was at the end of war liberated from Nazi rule by American soldiers. This young boy was in fact himself. The first-hand experience of cruelty gave him credibility in discussing the dangers of indifference; he was a victim himself.

When Wiesel said, “One day when I was able to get up, I decided to look at myself in the mirror on the opposite wall. I had not seen myself since the ghetto. From the depths of the mirror, a corpse was contemplating me. (115)” it revealed how little there was left of him after the camps.

Elie Wiesel is a Holocaust survivor who strongly believes that people need to share their stories about the Holocaust with others. Elie Wiesel was in concentration camps for about half of his teen years along with his father. After being the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust he resolved to make what really happened more well-known. Elie Wiesel wrote dozens of books and submitted an essay titled “A God Who Remembers” to the book This I Believe. The essay focused on Elie Wiesel’s belief that those who have survived the Holocaust should not suppress their experiences but must share them so history will not repeat itself. Elie Wiesel’s essay, “A God Who Remembers,” was successful in both informing others about the Holocaust and

It becomes clear that Elie Wiesel`s commentary on human nature is that, during extreme circumstances, people are selfish and would achieve anything for their own survival. Furthermore, In Wiesel’s novel people strived to survive this injustice. For example, the Holocaust caused countless amount of

The truth of these feelings and their actions for Wiesel, prove that indifference is the worst action a human can elicit. Precisely because it is an inaction. When a man is upset, all kinds of things can be thought up to seek revenge. When a women feels hatred in her heart towards someone she may devise a plan to change the situation for herself. He recalled this type of response when he was liberated, the rage he saw in Americans, “Liberated a day earlier by American soldiers, he remembers their rage at what they saw…their eyes told him what he needed to know — that they too, would remember, and bear witness.”

Elie Wiesel enlightens his audience of the injustice Roosevelt submitted Jewish refugees to. Wiesel exclaims that he doesn't not understand if, "Roosevelt was a good man, with a heart." Wiesel questions the indifference in the president of the free world and why he didn't allow these refugees into the country. If Wiesel had not presented this information to his audience about the root and extreme problem of indifference in the country, do you think people would have realized just how terrible the problem is and how neglectful we are of our