Rhetorical Analysis Essay On Compassion

In Barbara Lazear Ascher’s essay “On Compassion” she analyzes the idea of compassion primarily through the way society treats the homeless/less fortunate. Using anecdotal narratives and rhetorical questions, she contemplates on the true motives behind compassion and encourages her audience to ponder on this same situation. * Ascher begins her essay with an anecdote about a homeless man approaching a mother and her baby using eloquent, high-level language. As she begins to describe the man, she states that his “carefully plaited dreadlocks bespeak a better time” (paragraph 1). In this one sentence, she implies the man’s race and clarifies that he was not homeless his whole life. Ascher suggests the high socioeconomic class of the neighborhood as the man “crosses Manhattan’s Seventy-ninth Street” (1) and also implies the race of the mother and her baby who is “in an Aprica stroller” (1). She clearly expresses the mother’s fear as “her hands close tighter on the stroller’s handle” when she sees the man approach her. When his eyes fixes on her baby, she starts to rummage through her purse. During her search, the woman finds “lipstick, a lace handkerchief, an address book” (3) until she finds

When she was at the shop, a man walks in wearing a “stained blanket pulled up to his chin” who smells of “stale cigarettes and urine” (7). This graphic description of the man instills a feeling of disgust in the audience. He stands there until a “moody French woman” walks towards him and handing him “steaming coffee in a Styrofoam cup, and a small paper bag” of what is perhaps a croissant. He accepts the food and leaves the bread shop. Just like she did in the preceding anecdotal narrative she question why the woman demonstrated this act of compassion. Is she truly doing it out of kindness or “does she simply want to rid her shop of his troublesome presence?”