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Mary Roach's 'How To Know If You Are Dead'

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In “How to know if you’re dead” the author defines the topic of a brain-dead patient. How we really know if you are death? This question struggled people for century as well the author Mary Roach. “The legal community took a little longer than the physicians to come around to concept of brain death”. (12) Brain death is the complete and irreversible loss of brain function. Roach definition of brain-dead patient begins with “beating-heart cadaver” and “a patient on the way to surgery” (3). She is alive in some sense and well everywhere, but her brain. The body is hook up to a respirator that helps her to breath and her heart to beat. “If you touched her arm, you would find it warm and resilient, like your own.” (4)
However, the patient is a
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Yet when looking over the entirety of it, it seems that Roach uses sequential structure to manipulate the readers into possibly donating their bodies to science by giving a clear-cut explanation of how the organ extraction procedure works. This is effective because when trying to persuade a person into doing something that requires a large amount of commitment, people usually want to know exactly what they're getting into-- no ambiguity, no bias, and nothing misleading. The beginning of the excerpt contains graphic imagery, some of which is shown through similes, depicting the removal of cadaver H’s internal organs in order to donate them to living humans who need them. In the section she uses descriptive phrases such as “‘Cherry Sno-Kone’” and the simile “cutting off veins and arteries to be included, like spare sweater buttons” to implant a vivid illustration of the scene in the reader’s mind. By using this imagery, Roach places the reader into the situation she’s recreating in order to make it easier to manipulate or convince them to donate their organs after death.

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