Civil Disobedience Rhetorical Analysis

In his famous essay, “Letter from Birmingham Jail,’’ Martin Luther King, Jr. cites conscience as a guide to obeying just laws and defying unjust laws. In the same way, Henry David Thoreau wrote in his famous essay, “Civil Disobedience,” that people should do what their conscience tells them and not obey unjust laws. The positions of the two writers are very close; they use a common theme of conscience, and they use a similar rhetorical appeal of ethos.

He gives the audience a reason to believe him, a person of conscience must choose whether to refuse and disobey the government, or to pay their taxes. “In other words, when a sixth of the population of a nation, which has undertaken to be the refuge of liberty, are slaves, and a whole country is unjustly overrun and conquered by a foreign army, and subjected to military law, I think that it is not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize” (Thoreau ). If the government required people to obey “unjust laws”(Thoreau 373), then people should break the laws even if they wind up in prison. “Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison” (Thoreau ). The laws were meant to be obeyed, but Thoreau believes if the laws should be broken for

Thoreau did not pay poll tax for six years. He was then thrown in jail. Yet he seemed surprised by that fact that the government would throw him in jail for not paying taxes. While lamenting the fact that he is in jail, Thoreau also offers many philosophical rumblings about the government and expects the readers of his essay to take any of what he says seriously despite the fact that he is not qualified whatsoever to reflect of the state of the country's political system.

At the time, slavery was still an issue and this may have caused Thoreau to further criticize the government as it was oppressing people and no one was doing anything to restrain it from occurring. Within his chapter he mentions that there is a need of someone to “revolutionize” (303) and take a stand against the government to free the oppressed and get rid of any measures taken by the government to “force [him] to become like [them].” Due to this Thoreau was a radical because he wanted change to come about instead of simply going back to a previous political system. He mainly wanted to get rid of any form of government and would rather live based on his own ideas instead of having the government impose ideas upon its people.

In the essay of Civil of Disobedience, Thoreau goes into detail about his personal interaction with civil disobedience. Thoreau hasn’t paid a poll tax for six years. Poll taxes are a tax levied on every adult, without reference to income or resources. Thoreau was placed into jail for punishment for rebelling against the government. Thoreau says his experience in jail did not hurt his spirit: "I saw that, if there was a wall of stone between me and my townsmen, there was a still more difficult one to break through, before they could get to be as free as I was." Since the State couldn't reach his essential self, they decided to punish his body. This illustrated the State's ultimate weakness, and Thoreau says that he came to pity the State. The masses can't force him to do anything; he is subject only to those who obey a higher law. He says that he has to obey his own laws and try to flourish in this way.

Thoreau pleads to his reader’s feelings by talking about what he regards as demeaning to the American people, especially the Government’s prisoners. Thoreau then talks about the men who work for the government, which he describes the men as being

Henry David Thoreau’s words that “disobedience is the true foundation of liberty” and that “the obedient must be slaves” is a political statement that never lost its topicality during the Romantic era. Thoreau served as an important contributor to the philosophical and American literary movement known as New England Transcendentalism. Nature and the conduct of life are two central themes that are often weaved together in his essays and books that were published in the Romantic era of literature. Thoreau brought these two themes together to write on how people ought to live a simplistic life through embracing nature. His naturalistic writing intertwined cataloging and observation with Transcendentalist views of nature. Through his life and

In the play, The Night Thoreau Spent in Jail by authors Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, we see Henry David Thoreau locked in jail because of his unyielding will to not conform to the government or society's expectations, when their expectations are unwholesome. During his time spent in jail we see the idea of transcendentalism develop through Henry’s belief that even though he’s is locked up he is more free than any freeman could ever hope to be. Just as it was relevant in Thoreau's lifetime, freeing yourself from society’s norms /freedom from the government, transcending yourself, and being individualistic are all still important now.

Brown was sentenced to death and called ridiculous for his actions by the community; Thoreau took the opportunity to deliver a speech address to Brown called A Plea for Captain John Brown. He praised Brown’s decision to take action and drew a representation of a fearless man willing to take a stand for others “A man of rare common-sense and directness of speech, as of action; a transcendentalist above all, a man of ideas and principles, --that was what distinguished him. Not yielding to a whim or transient impulse, but carrying out the purpose of a life…I do not believe in erecting statues to those who still live in our hearts, whose bones have not yet crumbled in the earth around us, but I would rather see the statue of Captain Brown in the Massachusetts State-House yard, than that of any other man whom I know. I rejoice that I live in this age, that I am his contemporary.” (“Avalon Project- A Plea For Captain John Brown By Henry David Thoreau; October 30,1959”). This is the example of the moral system Thoreau wanted others to adopt; here, one man’s decision to take a step and make a change for those who couldn’t do it for themselves, would make a difference in the current society.

Thoreau believed that individual integrity had the ability to triumph the government. Thoreau went to jail because he refused to pay his poll taxes for the past six years. Also, he protested against the Mexican war, and slavery, which also contributed to him going to jail and his views on the government. During his short period in jail he clarified that he did not dread it, and portrayed it as “Traveling into a far country” (964).

From the start of man fighting for freedom or his beliefs, the question has consistently been whether a person can wage a battle using words rather than actions. The notion of civil disobedience would seem to be an inept weapon against political inequity; history, however, has persistently proven it to be the most dynamic weapon of the individual. By refusing to pay his taxes and subsequently being imprisoned, Henry David Thoreau demonstrated this very defiance. Thoreau’s Resistance to Civil Government conveys the effectiveness of the individual conscience, renounces hypocrisy, and cultivates a sense of urgency where inaction creates a moral conflict. This path of responsibility paved by Thoreau gave our leaders of today the means they

One example of the government’s injustice that Thoreau depicts is the way that the government manipulates the members of the standing army. Thoreau claims that, soldiers are prompted by an undue respect for the law and will blindly follow orders from a higher-ranking individual, even at the expense of their conscience and their own common sense. In Thoreau’s opinion, the government has taken away all moral judgment and awareness of the men who are in the military. By using these men to fight in a supposed unjust war, the government has taken away all semblance of intelligent thought and has reduced the members of its army to men created out of clay or wood. In turn, these men become merely a vessel through which the government is able to accomplish its own purpose. Instead of individuals working in harmony to accomplish a greater goal, Thoreau eludes to the idea that the army has as much worth as a herd of horses or a group of dogs; something that is used simply as a tool and not recognized for the individual ideas or perspectives. As a conclusion of sorts to his section about the standing army, Thoreau contemplates on the fine line between being a slave to the government, and refusing to follow government mandates and restrictions.

The concepts of chivalry and courtly love were deeply embedded into medieval English culture. A strict code of conduct existed that dictated how honorable men acted. This code required that men use their strength to protect and defend the weak, never to take advantage of them. The principles of chivalry were very godly, but the author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight saw some flaws in them. The author felt that despite the importance of chivalry, society required men to behave in foolish ways in the name of chivalry. In this story, the author honors chivalry in general but ridicules foolish traditions practiced in the name of the concept.

For Thoreau, the escape from society was a way to deeply learn about himself and human nature. He writes, “Every morning was a cheerful invitation to make my life of equal simplicity, and I may say innocence, with Nature herself” (Thoreau 72). This simple way of life allowed Thoreau to analyze himself and tendencies within society. He explains the effects of this solitary life on a person: “In proportion as he simplifies his life, the laws of the universe will appear less complex, and solitude will not be solitude, nor poverty poverty, nor weakness weakness” (253). Thoreau was able to discover flaws in society. He states, “... men establish and conform their daily life of routine and habit every where, which still is built on purely illusory foundations” (78). Unlike Hester and Sethe, the societal norms Thoreau experiences are not painful punishments or dehumanizing treatment. However, the “opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe … through poetry, philosophy and religion” (80), can still have a profound and often negative effect on individuals and society as a whole. Thoreau is able to overcome these societal norms because he separates himself from them. Thoreau explains of humankind, “When we are unhurried and wise, we perceive that only great and worthy things have any permanent and absolute existence,-that petty fears and petty pleasures are but the

The Canterbury Tales is a collection of more than 20 stories, written in Middle English around the 1380s, during the Hundred Years' War, by Geoffrey Chaucer. Within a narrative about a pilgrimage,(from Southwark to the shrine of Saint Thomas Becket at Canterbury Cathedral) Chaucer sets a series of stories. These collection of stories are built around a frame narrative, which was an already established and common genre of the 14th century. (The tales are in verse, except The Parson's Tale and Chaucer's own story of Melibee which are in prose.) Chaucer's collection of tales differs from other story compilations, since most story collections are focused on a theme, usually on a religious one. In Boccaccio's Decameron (which contains more parallels