Analysis Of Scott Russell Sanders 'Staying Put: Making Home In A Restless World'

Scott Russell Sanders’ passage from ‘Staying Put: making home in a Restless World’ gives readers the idea that roaming foreign territory and enforcing your ways is worse than staying put and adapting to your surroundings. Sanders achieves this mood through the use of parallelism, juxtaposition, rhetorical questions, and other rhetorical devices.

Within the first sentence of the passage, Sanders paints a picture that Americans think that they are inherently good people, always the alpha of the pack that is the world. He describes our selfishness and need for acquiring more land as a ‘seductive virtue’, which can be found in lines 1-2. Sanders again pokes fun at the ‘American Lifestyle’ in lines 20-25. He describes that ‘only a populace drunk on driving, a populace infatuated with the myth of an open road could hear such a proposal without hooting’. This line infers that our Capitalist economy has a utopian propaganda when it comes to spending money. In lines 21-23, the idea of tripling america’s highway system is layed in contrast with the idea that no tax money would be needed. Thix Juxtaposition is another way rhetorical devices have been used within this passage to show America’s pattern of consuming more than we need.

The lines following line 44 are given in the tone of Salman Rudshie. He gives readers the tone that Americans are poor at adapting to the world, and they must learn from modern migrants who “make a new imaginative relationship with the world, because of the loss of familiar habits”. Rudshie’s critical tone goes on in lines 59-62, using the analogy of forcing industrial and commercial habits on foreign ground is synonymous if ‘the mind were a cookie-cutter and the land wer