Rhetorical Analysis Of John Alcott's The Awakening

Alcott uses metaphor at the end of her essay to make john’s death more real to the audience. She expresses how “. . .he looked a most heroic figure, lying there stately and still as the statue of some young knight asleep upon his tomb” (Alcott 3). Alcott never describes John as weak or ill, even in death she sees him as brave and noble. Through comparing his body to that of a sleeping knight, Alcott informs her audience of how his self sacrifice immortalized him as a hero, revealing the lasting impact of selflessness. Although his death was no happy affair, Alcott wants to convey that John’s death was an honorable one. Accordingly, she uses a metaphor when she describes death as a “. . .long day which knows no night” (3). This comparison portrays death in a warmer light, as if John was embarking on an endless respite instead of ceasing to exist. Again revealing to a previously ignorant audience the rewards of selfless acts, her words could possibly intimate that through his self sacrifice, she

Hitchens uses a telling metaphor when he learns that Mark had wanted to contact him before he died, explaining, “That was a gash in my hide all right” (2). Comparing his emotional dismay to a physical wound, Hitchens illuminates the depth of Mark’s effect on him. The “gash” that Mark’s story left on him again reveals to the audience how one person can alter another’s life. When Hitchens first meets the Daily family, he uses a smilie when remarking, “They looked too good to be true: like a poster for the American way” (2). Using ellipses for emphasis, Hitchens compares Mark’s family to a model for all Americans. This view of the family communicates to Hitchens’ American audience that Mark and his relatives resemble our values and preserve our way of life. Hitchens puts the family in a positive light so that his audience can relate to them and sympathize with them. Hitchens wants the people he describes to effect the audience as Mark’s story effected