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Rhetorical Strategies In The Crucible By Nathaniel Hawthorne And Arthur Miller

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In The Scarlet Letter and The Crucible Nathaniel Hawthorne and Arthur Miller use a great number of rhetorical strategies in order to argue that a person's conscience should take precedence over their religion. A rhetorical strategy that is used quite often by the two authors is pathos, in which they tapped into the reader's emotions to convince them of this idea.
In The Scarlet Letter the character Dimmesdale is the one with the heavy conscience due to the fact that he is Pearl’s biological father. He does not admit to this sin because he is in an eminent position by being a minister of the community. Nathaniel Hawthorne values pathos many times in which to describe the agony and the aching that Dimmesdale goes through throughout the story.

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