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Elie Wiesel Ethos Pathos Logos

431 Words2 Pages

Elie Wiesel, an American Jewish holocaust survivor, that was also a political activist, writer, and professional speaks a heartfelt speech to get across his message about the people who died in the Holocaust by using rhetorical techniques

By using logos, Wiesel reiterates what it looked like to be a child and live through the holocaust that affected everyone around him. As a child, he was not able to thoroughly understand what it was like being a child when the Nazis made all Jewish citizens go to ghettos, using sealed cattle cars, which paints a logical picture. “A young Jewish boy discovers the kingdom of night. I remember his bewilderment, I remember his anguish.” Wiesel perceives the information by talking about himself in the third person.

Wiesel uses ethos in the speech as in developing trust with the listener by admitting it’s not his place to speak for the dead because as an adolescent, he couldn’t understand the hardships of the elders, which only goal was to survive and protect their kids. “And then I explained to him how naive we were—As long as one child is hungry, our lives will be filled with anguish and shame.” A …show more content…

Confessing how the child he keeps mentioning is him, and how sad he is to know that child is still scared and hopeless in that time of situation where he was not able to do anything. He had to stand there and watch every piece of memory be destroyed by the nazis, creating an empathetic wave over the people who were listening to him speak. “This is what I say to the young Jewish boy wondering what I have done with his years. It is in His name that I speak to you and that I express to you my deepest gratitude. No one is as capable of gratitude as one who has emerged from the kingdom of night.” Wiesel then stated that we don’t live for ourselves, we truly live for others, and others live for

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First, Wiesel uses ethos to keep his audience engaged and believing what he’s saying. For example, “Fifty-four years ago to the day, a young Jewish boy from a small town in the Carpathian Mountains woke up, not far from Goethe’s beloved Weimar, in a place of eternal infamy called Buchenwald” (Wiesel). Wiesel uses this because it gives him credibility. He is the young Jewish boy and he knows what he’s talking about. This is important for the audience to know so they believe what he’s saying.

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Hope, Despair, and Memory: A Rhetorical Analysis In Elie Wiesel’s Nobel Prize speech, “Hope, Despair, and Memory”, the Holocaust survivor uses various rhetorical devices, such as repetition, rhetorical questions and anecdotes. Furthermore, these devices are used to convey the themes of hope, despair, and memory; they work to evoke emotional responses from the audience as well as highlighting the urgency of the themes. Therefore, the use of repetition, rhetorical questions, and anecdotes will all be explored in this analysis. In addition, we will dissect how the use of rhetorical devices enhances the delivery of Wiesel’s speech and how they make the speech more impactful.

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Wiesel wanted to make us feel sad and trust him by using pathos in the speech. At the beginning of the speech, he states, “Do I have the right to accept this great honor on their behalf? I do not. No one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions.” In this part of his talk, he tells the people that no one can ever make up for the loss of so many people in the concentration camps.

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He uses this to encourage his audience to reflect on the previous thousand years’ legacy and adopt an attitude of consideration going forward. He spoke the day after the anniversary of Buchenwald’s liberation, which coincidentally took place the day before Theodore Roosevelt’s death. Wiesel speaks about Roosevelt, “He is very much present to me and to us” (312) making his time of death relevant by referencing how he influenced Wiesel directly by being indifferent to the suffering of the Jews. He uses Roosevelt’s choices as an example of the consequences of indifference. The timing of his release from Buchenwald is used to begin his speech, explaining how he felt at that time to lead into the weight of the topic.

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In the awful conditions that Wiesel had endured, death was a common wish; but Wiesel had to live for his father. In this we see a constant struggle with himself between what he wishes for himself, and what

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In his speech, he states: “if we forget them, they will be killed a second time. And this time, it will be our responsibility.” (Wiesel 118). This signifies Wiesel's understanding of the weight his book carries. This book projects all the terror, fear and helplessness of this time.

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Living through horrific events changed people, for Wiesel, with suffering came a platform to speak out and end

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Wiesel continually brought up gratitude, joy, compassion and the children. The use of Pathos in this speech was evident throughout, the audience was in his shoes and felt his

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Wiesel does not recognize and cannot identify as the person he sees before him, because his identity was stolen from him. We have all heard the saying that we are all unique and special in our own way, and how no two people are the same. We spend years developing our identity, and becoming our own person, because all of us start out the same way: a small, helpless, and vulnerable infant. Our identity is defined by many things, but usually one main thing stands out from the rest. Wiesel, for example, was devoted to his God, and when he lost faith, he was torn apart.

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a prisoner, killed his own father for a loaf of bread. It shows us the impact of the holocaust on people which causes them to break mentally and physically hurt the people they consider closest to them for desperation. Another quote states “I did not weep,... if I could have searched the recesses of my feeble conscience, I might have found something like Free at last!... ”(Wiesel 112) When Eli’s father died he did not cry and deep down in his head he was a little glad that he died because he started to see him as a child and a burden, not a father.

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When Wiesel makes it clear that he has suffered personal loss, he is evoking an emotional response from his audience. By stating that he senses their presence “The presence of my parents, that of my little sister.” the audience empathizes with him and the horror of the Holocaust is made more clear for them. They cannot only understand his feelings; they can connect to them which strengthens their understanding of the need to act whenever they witness inhumanity.

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In conclusion, Elie Wiesel is a Holocaust survivor that delivers his effective speech on effects of indifference and makes sure the audience is aware coming into this new century. He uses facts from his history multiple time to back up his purpose. Furthermore, he leaves the audience with sympathy due to his history, but his ambition was to act as an admonition towards all the American people; that we should not only focus on what’s affecting our nation but to look over those who are on the verge of suffering. Not to mention that Wiesel’s message can be reflected as a reminder for today’s generation to prevent history from repeating.

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The speech, Mr. Wiesel showed to the audience that he knows of these events firsthand because he shared his own personal suffering and established ethos by telling the story in first person. He argued about the guilt of past violent events and proclaimed that said events could have been avoided if humanity had been less indifferent. He stated that had someone have intervened earlier, these events could have been avoided. Nonetheless, Mr. Wiesel still showed gratitude to those who intervened and fought those responsible for the hardship of himself and his people. However, he still did not understand why they did not do an intervention at an earlier time to avoid the suffering of thousands of people.

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Wiesel’s use of ethos, pathos, logos, diction, and allusion certainly gives the audience information and emotions he was hoping

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Wiesel’s speech shows how he worked to keep the memory of those people alive because he knows that people will continue to be guilty, to be accomplices if they forget. Furthermore, Wiesel knows that keeping the memory of those poor, innocent will avoid the repetition of the atrocity done in the future. The stories and experiences of Wiesel allowed for people to see the true horrors of what occurs when people who keep silence become “accomplices” of those who inflict pain towards humans. To conclude, Wiesel chose to use parallelism in his speech to emphasize the fault people had for keeping silence and allowing the torture of innocent

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