preview

How Does Walls Use Pathos In The Glass Castle Rhetorical Analysis Essay

Decent Essays

In the Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, Walls uses pathos to make her point. Pathos is a rhetorical device that appeals to your emotions. “When other girls came in and threw away their lunch bags in the the garbage pails, I’s go retrieve them. I couldn’t get over the way kids tossed out all this perfectly good food: apples, hard-boiled eggs, packages of peanut-butter crackers, sliced pickles, half-pint cartons of milk, cheese sandwiches with just one bite taken out because the kid didn’t like the pimentos in cheese,” (Walls 173). Walls uses this device frequently in her book to appeal to the reader’s emotions when she talks about her family or her personal experiences. This quote shows how everyday, Walls constantly had to scavenge for food. This tugs at your heart because you couldn’t imagine …show more content…

Walls uses specific words to bring her memories to the readers. A vivid example of this is in the second chapter of the book. “I stabbed one of the hot dogs with a fork and bent over and offered it to him. The weiner was hot, so Juju licked at it tentatively, but when I stood up and started stirring the hot dogs again, I felt a blaze of heat on my right side. I turned to see where it was coming from and realized that my dress was on fire. Frozen with fear, I watched the yellow-white flames make a ragged brown line up the pink fabric of my skirt and climb my stomach. Then the flames leaped up, reaching my face, (Walls 9). In this excerpt, Walls uses words such as ‘ragged’ and ‘leaped’ to create an image in your mind. In fact, when she talks about the heat climbing up her leg you can almost feel it. Walls uses figurative language to help add to the imagery of the story as well as add to the pathos because she could use a phrase that compares how hungry she was or how they were

Get Access