Rhetorical Analysis On Dumpster Diving

In his essay “On Dumpster Diving”, Lars Eighner provides information on what life is like to a homeless person, in this case himself. To that end, Eighner’s purpose does not address negative aspects of the same, rather he focuses on dumpster diving as a way of scavenging. He adopts a neutral and informative tone, however, towards the end the tone shifts to critical and pitiful and he, also, uses precise and scientific diction to make his essay more persuasive. With the use of scientific diction we can see that Eighner aims toward the educated audience who looks upon dumpster diving as disgusting. Nevertheless, Eighner uses the appeals to ethos, pathos, and logos to further explain his way of life as not a horrid one. Throughout the essay Eighner’s purpose is not to promote dumpster diving as a good way of life but to describe this life and show how a person lives from it as well as display dumpster diving as not a sickening thing.

He, first, explains how the usage of Dumpster Diving came to be. Eighner clarifies that this came to be known from the word belonging to the Dempsey Dumpster company. However, he is not very pleased with the phrase dumpster diving so instead he prefers to call it scavenging. Additionally, Eighner always capitalizes the word dumpster which shows us that he, actually, respects the dumpster divers and he is not ashamed being one of them. “ I prefer the word scavenging and use the word scrounging when I mean to be obscure. I have heard people, evidently meaning to be polite. use the word foraging, but I prefer to reserve that word for gathering nut and berries” (paragraph 3). Here Eighner explains that he prefers the word scavenging since he is a scavenger himself living of the refuse of others and not foraging because it does not quite correspond with the activity that he