Analysis Of Anna Quindlen's A Quilt Of A Country

Henry Ford, one of the most notorious successful Americans that invented the assembly line, once said “Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success”. The United States of America was founded on immigration which today, there is an extensive diversity of cultures inhabiting America which would leave people to believe that the idea of it being a self-governing country is an outrageous idea but it in fact worked. America is able to succeed despite being an “improbable idea” by how the country is able to unite and recover quickly after times of hardship and how the citizens are able to tolerate and coexist with other despite their differences.

America is able to succeed despite being an “Improbable

To start off, in the article titled A Quilt of a Country: Out of Many, One? by Anna Quindlen, she writes that America is a “mongrel nation” that has “one spirit”(8) after the terrorist attack on September 11, 2001. Here, Quindlen uses pathos to grasps the reader’s emotions when talking about the one spirit whenever the Americans united after the horrible attack on 9/11 where so many people perished which makes the reader feel sorrow for the families that had to suffer from the deaths of their loved ones. The “one spirit” means that everyone, no matter the color of their skin or the language they speak, feels the same emotions because of the pain that the country suffered. Even though people in America are certainly different from one another, they united into one group of people, a nation, after the tragic terrorist attack that caused the grand loss of life. Another example of this occurring is from the 16th President of the United States, Abraham Lincoln’s speech titled Second Inaugural Address where he states that after the Civil War, “God [lets] us see the right”(6) after we bind up the nation’s wounds. Lincoln uses ethos in his speech

An example of this is also in the article A Quilt of a Country: Out of Many, One? where Quindlen says that “[America]” was built of bits and pieces that are discordant “like a crazy quilt”(1). Here, Quindlen uses the crazy quilt as a Synecdoche for the country of America. A Synecdoche is used to represent something as a whole and a quilt represents America by how it is made up of several non uniform and different sized pieces but as a quilt, it is strong because all of the parts are sewn together to create one giant piece of fabric. America is formed just like that where when many different people are put together, they make a strong nation. When the citizens coexist with each other, they do so because they can tolerate each other because despite their differences, patriotism leads them to unity and being strong. Another example of this is from the Second Inaugural Address where Abraham Lincoln states that we should “let us judge not” that we be “not judged”(6) because of the horrible things that we have done to one another during the civil war. This is an allusion to the infamous biblical story of Moses when he teaches people God’s word and he says this because even though other people have done bad things, we can’t judge them because we have done things just as bad. Lincoln uses this to show that everyone is in the