Rhetorical Analysis Of Superman And Me

Superman and Me is an inspirational and moving passage that effectively uses rhetoric to develop a strong story of an indian boy who used reading to overcome the stereotype of being expected to fail. Sherman Alexie, the author, was a poor young Indian boy living on a reservation his dad loved reading so his house was filled with books and he loved reading books this passage explains how reading saved his life. Sherman uses ethos, pathos, and rhetorical strategies such as hyperbole, anaphora, tone shift, parallelism, and zeugma.
Sherman Alexie strongly uses strong ethos to develop his argument. In the background paragraph Sherman uses ethos. Sherman states “Living on an Indian reservation we were a poor family by most standards”. He uses this
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When Sherman says “lived on a combination of irregular paychecks, hope, fear, and government surplus food” he is using a zeugma. A zeugma is a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses. Sherman uses anaphora at the beginning of the seventh paragraph. He states “i refused to fail. I was smart. I was arrogant I was lucky. I read books late into the night, until i could barely keep my eyes open. I read books at recess, then during lunch...I read books in the car”. In these sentences he starts starting each sentence with I to emphasize that he did it the actions required to overcome the native American boy stereotype of being expected to fail this also makes the paragraph parallelism. Sherman uses a tone shift between paragraphs five and six the tone of the first part of the passage is gloomy and melancholy by talking about his poor family situation and him being expected to fail. But the tone shifts to inspirational and motivational by using the anaphora to show all the things he did to overcome the stereotype and become an educated successful Indian. Sherman uses an analogy when he first mentions superman breaking down the door to save someone” but he reads it as “I am breaking down the door” superman breaking down the door also refers to Sherman as a teacher when he states "I throw my weight against their locked doors” he is talking about him helping his students by saving their life through education. Sherman not only uses superman as an analogy but also as a symbol Sherman also uses hyperbole when he states “Our house was filled with books. They were stacked in crazy piles in the bathroom, bedrooms and living rooms.” He is not saying that there were literal thousands of books but there were a lot of books. He uses this hyperbole to help his imagery to develop a picture for the reader to imagine. Sherman uses a metaphor when he says “i began to think of everything in