Pathos In Equiano's Narrative

Pathos is a Greek word that means suffering or experience. Pathos is a word that brings pity or sadness that represents an appeal to the audience's emotions.

Within The Glass Castle, Jeannette Walls uses the rhetorical device pathos to help connect with her readers and make it so they can better comprehend her story and the difficulties she often had to deal with. “Mom said Dad was never the same after Mary Charlene died. He started having dark moods, staying out late and coming home drunk and losing jobs (Walls,28)”. This passage is a prime example of pathos seeing

In “Bless me, Ultima” Rudolfo Anaya created pathos throughout the story with different techniques. Pathos is a form of convincing the readers of an argument and forming an emotional response. Rudolfo Anaya uses three techniques to create pathos, he uses a pathetic situation, actual life, and goth and grotesque. A pathetic situation creates emotional response with a well-developed character. Actual life is created by the writer making the reader feel as if there in the position of the character or see it happening around in real life.

This rhetorical device helps the reader understand what the author is feeling by conveying certain emotions. In Sullivan’s essay, the emotion that she was trying to convey was of how she wanted to be indolent and not go to a funeral because she did not see the importance of it. “I was 16 and trying to get out of going to calling hours for Miss Emerson, my old fifth grade math teacher” (Sullivan). Even though she did not want to go to the funeral, she ended up going. Twenty years later, the teacher’s mother still remembers the author’s name. This anecdote brings the emotion of homesickness and melancholy. Pathos can help the author connect with the reader by displaying the emotions they felt at that time of the

Pathos is used in order to link the essay with the reader’s emotions and ethos is used to show the writers moral character. For example, pathos is used when Kozol speaks to a student of a Bronx high school, “Think of it this way,” said a sixteen-year-old girl. “If people in New York woke up one day and learned that we were gone…how would they feel?...I think they’d be relieved.” (Kozol 205) This part of the essay really made me feel sad for this girl who lives in a society where she has grown up feeling like now one cares about her or others of her race.

Pathos appeals to the reader’s emotions by using emotional stories and imagery. Pathos strategies are often used to grab and hold the reader’s attention. Emotional or personal stories give the reader an opportunity to emotionally relate to the story, and allows them to be emotionally connected. An emotionally connected reader is more interested in the story that a reader who is not emotionally connected.

Throughout the book The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, Equiano tries to say that he is just an ordinary person, but this cannot be the case. He survives several ship wrecks, learns to read and write, and is able to buy his freedom. This is far from ordinary and borderlines with extraordinary. As he describes his adventures he starts by telling you a depressing story of how his sister got separated from him. This sets up the reader to know that there is plenty more tragedy to come. This is when he gets thrown into a life of slavery. From there he tries to wiggle his way out from the life of a slave and to create his own. Equiano uses anecdotes that he has experienced to prove to his readers that slavery is cruel and unforgiving, such as the time when he was being transported, to the treatment under his masters, and finally even when he was a free man.

History shows that both Africans and African Americans alike faced unique problems prior to and during the 1800's, particularly prior to 1865. One such problem is the issue of Diaspora and how culture and slavery has affected the choice of religion. It is the purpose of this paper to expose comparatively the extent to which individuals have been influenced by these issues. One such individual is Olaudah Equiano. By following and analyzing some of the key moments of faith in his life, this paper seeks to expose the extent to which the series of controversial dialectical incidents that happen throughout his early life, i.e., his cultural African religious traditions

Pathos consists in arousing the emotions of the listeners and directing those emotions in an action that should be taken. In order to use pathos in my speech, I could reference personal experiences. For example if I were having a conversation with someone who just lost a family member, I could make a connection with them by telling them about a similar loss in my

When I read about Equiano's experience, I feel very bad for Equiano and I feel extremely grateful that I was born as a free person. I can’t imagine what it would feel like, to be eleven years old and forced to work for the rest of your life. It really makes me thankful for all the freedoms I have. I also really see the difference between European and African slavery. I see this from the quote “If ten thousand worlds had been my own, I would have freely parted with them all to have exchanged my condition with that of the meanest slave in my own country.” The quote means that if even if Equiano had ten thousand worlds, he would’ve given all of them away just to become a slave in Africa instead of being a slave to Europeans. This highlights all the struggles and horrors that young African boys went through. It makes me feel sad that humans can do these things to other humans.

Even though Olanduh Equiano's description about his experience on the middle passage was generic and broad, compared to what most readers already know about the Middle Passage, I still believe that it did tell the full story about the Middle Passage. No story can fully describe the brutality and cruelty one has received because there will always be details left out every time the story gets told. As stated before, the Middle Passage was always known as an appalling and unimaginable event that slaves had to go through. When Equiano first entered the shipped, he was shocked by terror when he was "handled and tossed up" and was in a "world of bad spirits". Within the first couple of minutes, he already knew how mistreated he was about be. Slaves

Pathos, according to merriam-webster.com, is defined as “an element in experience or in artistic representation evoking pity or compassion”. The Rich Brother uses this appeal to grasp the heart strings of its audience; to have compassion and/or pity towards the brothers. As author Tobias Wolff states in this piece, “Do you remember when you used to try to kill me? ...Is that strange or what? I was afraid that you’d get mad if you found out that I knew you were trying to kill me” (328-329). In this quote Tobias Wolff, a short story author, makes

The story of Equiano was a very interesting look into the life of a slave. This narrative was particularly interesting because he told his story all the way from the beginning. The reader gets to follow his journey from when he was a small boy who is kidnapped all the way up to adulthood. I don’t think anyone can really imagine what his life must have been like during these events. He does paint a picture of the harshness and how scary many things he encountered were for him. Being a young child with no one to turn to thrust into the world of a rough and harrowing sea voyage is horrible, but add the cruelty and the inhuman conditions that the slaves were faced with and the narrative becomes a down right atrocity. It is amazing to me that

The narrative by Olaudah Equiano gives an interesting perspective of slavery both within and outside of Africa in the eighteenth century. From these writings we can gain insight into the religion and customs of an African culture. We can also see how developed the system of trade was within Africa, and worldwide by this time. Finally, we hear an insider's view on being enslaved, how slaves were treated in Africa, and what the treatment of African slaves was like at the hands of the Europeans.

In The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings by Olaudah Equiano, Equiano gave interesting descriptions of his and others experience as a slave. He begins his novel by first explaining the place where he grew up, Nigeria, Africa. This part of Africa during that time was very fruitful and rich. Given this location, it can be understood that Equiano came from a family of wealth and power. He was the youngest and most favored of his siblings. Equiano explained the different African traditions and practices, i.e. honoring the dead, arranged marriages, dance ceremonies. Equiano loved Africa and his family but sadly one horrific day, he and his older sister were stolen from their home and later separated from each other. Not only was he