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Rhetorical Analysis Of ' Mel 's ' My Friend Mel Mcginnis Essay

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Carver uses the protagonist, Mel, to aggressively drive the couples discussion, as well as to exemplify the complexity in the endeavor to define true love. Therefore, Carver makes his assertion of Mel 's superiority within the first sentence of the story. "My friend Mel McGinnis was talking. Mel McGinnis is a cardiologist, and sometimes that gives him the right" (Carver 132). To the reader, Mel is immediately seen as competent, as surely he is the only person among the couples who can accurately relay the correct definition of love. However, Mel is in fact dumbfounded to the idea of love, and is aggressively participating in the conversation despite his clear failure of a marriage. "Mel and Terri, on the other hand, have been together five years, and their surface-level civility to one another barely masks a deep-seated anger and resentment. Mel 's alcoholism, and increasing drunkenness over the course of the evening, sets a tone of increasingly intensified menace to the whole conversation" (Overview). Therefore, not only is Mel in a failing marriage, but he appears to be the reason behind the decline. Yet, Mel 's pursuit of an absolute answer to love preseceeds unhindered, even as his thought process now begins to contradict itself. "If he sees that Ed 's passion hardly qualifies as love, he need not feel quite as emotionally threatened by the dead lover, but only up to a point. It would not, for example, enhance Mel 's self-image for him to see the parallel between Ed 's

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