Lou Gehrig delivers an emotionally-charged, heart-wrenching farewell to his loving fans, colleagues and family, while reflecting and emphasizing how blessed he has been, despite the unfortunate turn of events. While his diction is less than sophisticated, Lou makes up the loss through his down through a strong concession refutation, a structure that makes up the entirety of his speech. This is initiated from very beginning, in the exordium when Gehrig states, "Fans, for the past two weeks you have been reading about the bad break I got. Yet today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth." In the first sentence, Gehrig addresses the elephant the room, (his doom due to the degenerative disease ALS, ironic due to the fact the disease attacked the very thing that made him exceptional, his athleticism) but reassures the audience by refuting this point with the fact he believes he is the luckiest man on earth, a point he goes on to defend for the remainder of his speech. He finishes the speech a final reiteration of his concession refutation to maximize the impact of his speech, "... I might have been given a bad break, but I've got an awful lot to live for." The appeal that Gehrig tries to evoke throughout his oration, and does with considerable success, is pathos. Gehrig, with a tone of incredible gratitude, begins to speak about the fans, how grateful he is been for their support and that they are all "grand fellows" . Then using the technique of apostrophe to single out individuals in the …show more content…
He gave the fans and those around him a form of closure through this speech, and let them knew he had accepted his fate, and in the end was proud of what they had achieved