Rhetorical Analysis Of My Night In Solitary

A rhetorical analysis simply “breaks down” the text from the “whole” into “pieces” in order to understand how the authors write and what rhetorical patterns they adopt to achieve their goals – that is, usually, to convey a main idea or a message to the audience. This paper will help the reader have a deeper look and understanding of a famous New York Times article “My night in solitary” by Rick Raemisch by analyzing in detail his effective use of rhetorical elements, including subject, thesis, purpose, audience, persona, ethos, authoritative testimony and analogy. The subject of this essay is obviously about solitary confinement, a horrible form of punishment for inmates, which is also a highly controversial issue in the United States over

He begins to reveal the terrifying reality in solitary prison. He depicts: “But in R.F.P. Ad Seg, no personal property is allowed. The room is about 7 by 13 feet. What little there is inside — bed, toilet, sink — is steel and screwed to the floor.” There is nothing in solitary cell except those that serves the basic needs such as bed, toilet and sink. He soon was “immersed in a drone of garbled noise — other inmates’ blaring TVs, distant conversations, shouted arguments”, which he could not understand at all. And at the peak of the dreadful state he “[felt] twitchy and paranoid”, which happened only after a few hours in there. He waited for the time to pass quickly in vein, so he started to “count the small holes carved in the walls” hopelessly to kill time. In this manner, Raemisch is teaching the audience one fact behind the bars that the condition of solitary confinement is so horrible that it drives prisoners crazy and insane as there is nothing for them to do while they are surrounded by a number of irritating noises. The author continues to tell what happened

He could not sleep well but “fell into a fitful sleep” instead because he “[awoke] every time a toilet flushed or an officer yanked on the doors” and because his sleep was interfered by several counts due to the Ad Seg rules, including “five scheduled counts and at least two random ones”. At least seven counts a night made him get tired and became to not care about that even though as an executive director, he would like to follow the rules. This is a usual reaction of a great number of inmates as they even “make earplugs out of toilet paper” to avoid bother from the those noises at night. And when he woke up in the morning, he started another daunting day without knowing anything to do and to kill time until the end of the day and so easily dropped in another terrible feeling of “twitchy and paranoid”. Besides, the author teaches the readers about the negative impact of solitary confinement on prisoners. By describing his feeling in jail, Raemisch represents that the condition in isolated prisons gradually but severely erodes and damages inmates’ mind. He cites Terry Kupers’ research and research from the 1980s to emphasize and validate his claim