Rhetorical Analysis Of Lost In The Kitchen By Dave Barry

Men are essentially rendered useless when it comes to helping women in the kitchen. The average male in American society is viewed as the bread winner of the family. He comes home and does nothing but relax, while the wife handles all the business in the house such as cooking dinner, cleaning the house, and taking care of the kid. In Dave Barry’s, “Lost in the Kitchen”, Barry analyzes his recent Thanksgiving experience and realizes that the stereotypes about men and women in the kitchen are indeed true. He tries to show that men who try to be helpful in the kitchen usually fail. Barry effectively uses humor to connect with his audience by using a light hearted tone to try to make it more relatable to the audience, while repeating differnt styles

He first approaches his essay in a carefree manner and at the same time, adding humor to his writing to make a more positive feeling for the readers. He continues to use a informal type of writing style to make the audience more connected and not feel too overwhelmed by using too many big words. Barry uses words such as "scum" to describe all mens relationship with the kitchen, in the sense that they are worthless when it comes to doing pretty much anything in the kitchen. Though the word “scum” has a negative connotation, men are technically “scum" because they are more focused on watching the Detroit Lions, rather than watching their own children. Another thing Barry does is he uses Antithesis, he starts off with a topic that’s completley diferent than the one he is actually going to address throughout the essay. He begins to talk about “sexual activity” to attract his audience, and tries to tie it back to Thanksgiving. This allowed him to add a fuuny description about another topic, therefore making him more effective overall. Barry also continues to use similes, for instance he compares himself to an “ill-trained Labrador retriever”. Men are being compared to animals in terms of how useful they are and the comparison to men in the kitchen is like a dog with a tiny brain of a two year old. Dave Bary uses many comparisons to show the

He says that some dads enjoy being covered in “baby vomit while their wives work as test pilots”. He believes that stay-at-home dads is the new career for men, and that staying at home can be a big help to men in the kitchen. In contrast, Barry uses asyndeton when he immediantly shifts back to mens lack of skill in the kitchen by describing his “specialty dish” that he makes at least once or twice a year. He continues to use a very long sentence structure to get his point, that even though men can’t be much help in the kitchen, they do try and that should be equally as important to a “cure for heart disease”. This hyperbole shows how a simple kitchen task can be such a huge accomplishment for an ordinary man. In the conclusion paragraph, Barry talks about the point of view of his wife, that before womens liberation, men took care of cars and the women took care of the kitchen. Women had a more womanly jobs, while the men had the more manly jobs. The stereotypes of women having a job of working in the kitchen and doing all the chores in the house, make men believe nowadays that it’s okay for women to do all the work and that men don’t need to do as much as they have to in the kitchen.

In conclusion “Lost in the Kitchen” portrays a story that focuses on the food of Thanksgiving, football, and the inability for men to multi task. Dave Barry uses distinctive styles