Into the Wild
This South Dakota resident becomes one of the few people McCandless keeps in touch with through letters.
Wayne Westerberg
This part of the rhetorical analysis essay can often function as the entire introduction under time constraints.
Thesis/Claim
Using the same pattern of words to illustrate that the ideas have the same level of importance.
"We've seen the unfurling of flags, the lighting of candles, the giving of blood, the saying of prayers -- in English, Hebrew, and Arabic" (George W. Bush).
Parallelism
This father of the American Transcendentalist movement sometimes felt like a transparent eyeball when experiencing the natural world.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Lowkey, most adults are blind to nature. Sun’s out? Yeah, they see it—but only kids let it straight into their heart.
Nature (Emerson)
To speak truly, few adult persons can see nature. Most persons do not see the sun. At least they have a very superficial seeing. The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.
This family secret, revealed midway through the book, most strongly reshapes the reader’s interpretation of McCandless’s anger and estrangement.
His parents' relationship starting in an affair when his father was still married to his first wife.
These establish a clear line of reasoning and show how an argument builds over the course of a text.
Ordering Phrases
The repetition of conjunctions in a series of coordinate words, phrases, or clauses.
“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds” (U.S. Postal Service Motto).
Polysyndeton
This man was imprisoned for not paying his poll tax in protest of slavery.
Henry David Thoreau
Not saying “no government,” that’s NPC logic. I’m saying better government, now. Everyone drop what kind of government gets their respect—that’s the first step to upgrading it.
Civil Disobedience (Thoreau)
But, to speak practically and as a citizen, unlike those who call themselves no-government men, I ask for, not at once no government, but at once a better government. Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.
Krakauer parallels McCandless’s story with this historical figure who also pursued a fatal vision of wilderness purity.
Everett Ruess
This is what you've been told to mark as you read by drawing lines between paragraphs.
Shifts
The repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive phrases, clauses, or lines.
Repetition of the same word or phrase at the end of successive clauses. “But in a larger sense, we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground” (Abraham Lincoln).
Anaphora
American Transcendentalism was heavily influenced by this British literary and artistic movement.
Romanticism
Action > flexing brain energy. No grind, no glow-up of thought. Can’t see life’s drip without doing. Words hit or they’re dead—if you ain’t lived it, you ain’t spitting facts.
The American Scholar (Emerson)
Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty. Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind. The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.
This non-Transcendentlist author most strongly influences McCandless’s philosophy of individualism and rejection of society.
Leo Tolstoy (or Jack London)
These are the three ways to earn sophistication.
1. Explaining the significance or relevance of the writer’s rhetorical choices (given the rhetorical situation).
2. Explaining a purpose or function of the passage’s complexities or tensions.
3. Employing a style that is consistently vivid and persuasive.
A question is asked and then answered rather than just asked for effect.
Hypophora
This Massachusetts town, often confused with a city in New Hampshire, is often considered the birthplace of American Transcendentalism.
There’s a moment when you realize: envy is brain-rot, copying is self-unaliving, and you gotta own all yourself—good or bad. The universe is stacked, but nothing grows for you without you grinding.
Self Reliance (Emerson)
"There is a time in every man's education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better, for worse, as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given to him to till."
In the last months of his life, McCandless underlines a passage from Doctor Zhivago that foreshadows his final realization. The passage centers on this idea.
Happiness is only real when shared.
In a rhetorical analysis conclusion, the writer should extend the author’s purpose by doing this.
Connecting it to a universal message about society, humanity, or human nature.
Understanding one thing with another, specifically using a part for the whole or the whole for the part. “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears” (Shakespeare)
Synecdoche
Transcendentalism is most commonly associated with this specific religious denomination.
Unitarianism
I wanted to go full tryhard on life—drain it dry, cut the filler, corner it, and see what it really is. If it’s mid, expose it. If it’s peak, know it firsthand and report back.