Barack Obama Allusion Essay

Barack Obama’s New Hampshire Primary speech has a lot of examples of allusion and intertextuality that are used to motivate the American people. Obama’s speech gives examples of past experiences that America has been through to prove that America has gone through a lot to get where it is now. He also uses allusion to give examples of areas where we can grow as a country. The speech was written in 2008, therefore he is using examples that are different than the events that might be used today. The first example of allusion in Obama’s speech is, “And we will never use 9/11 as a way to scare up votes, because it is not a tactic to win an election.” (2). Obama used a traumatic event for the American people to connect with listeners through a shared experience in his speech. He also uses allusion to show why he is different from other politicians. He explains that this experience should not be used to build votes; instead, it should be seen as a national tragedy. The use of this allusion might give people an emotional reaction to his speech, especially if they lived through it or lost someone in the towers. In other words, Obama is using pathos in his writing. Using this

Obama uses this example to explain further how we can come together as a country and better the parts of society that aren’t working anymore. This quote also enforces the pathos idea from the first example since slavery is also a dark part of America’s history. Slavery wasn’t abolished until the civil war in 1865 after slaves all over the country decided they didn’t want to be stuck in that life anymore and began to fight back. Similar to the quote from the first paragraph he is using a dark time in America’s history to give listeners faith in the idea that he can better the country while in