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The Use Of Ethos In The Lightless Sky

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In the novel The Lightless Sky, Passarlay tells of his traumatic year-long journey from Afghanistan to England. In the book, Passarlay recalls many of the terrifying events that happened to him along the way. Passarlay’s journey began when he was twelve years old after his grandfather and father were killed by U.S. troops for working with the Taliban. Passarlay experienced imprisonment, starvation, violence, and cruelty along his journey. After Passarlay’s year-long journey, he arrived in the United Kingdom where he attended the University of Manchester and graduated with a degree in politics. He is currently a member of many prestigious political, aid, and youth groups, but each of these are only steps to reaching his ultimate goal of running …show more content…

Ethos appeals to character and credibility and focuses attention on the writer’s or speaker’s trustworthiness. Passarlay uses ethos in The Lightless Sky by telling of his journey in a first-person point of view. Writing in the first-person helps people believe what he is saying because he went through it and experienced it. It also helps establish that Passarlay is somewhat of an expert in the smuggling field because he experienced plenty of it. As stated in the book, during an interrogation, one of the many events that happened to Gulwali during his journey, “One of the men behind me threw me forward suddenly so that my cheekbone crunched onto the tabletop” (124). Passarlay went through so many things during his journey that make him credible and an expert in so many things. Later in the book, Passarlay makes it clear that he has the community’s best interest at heart when he becomes a school’s ambassador for international arrivals. Stated in The Lightless Sky, “I had been one of those lost, scared children from a foreign land, and I knew how hard it was to fit in” (340). Not only does this quote show that Passarlay had his community’s best interest a heart, but it also represents that he was an “expert” in what these scared children were going through and he wanted to share his experience with them to help them fit …show more content…

Kairos often refers to the “timeless” of an argument. This rhetorical appeal is one of the reasons that Passarlay wrote this book. After Passarlay’s tragic journey, he believed that it was the right time for his audience to learn how the refugees were suffering. The event that started Passarlay’s refugee journey was America’s invasion of Afghanistan and the unsafety of the Taliban. As stated in the book, “Some of them were cajoling, others directly threatening; some of them even tried to grab us and make us go with them to a Taliban training camp there and then” (41). Passarlay wrote his story into a novel because there were very few books written by refugees telling their experiences of their journeys. The larger context of this piece is the inhumane treatment of immigrants. An example of this shown in the book is, “There are thousands living in camps now. We are refugees in our own homeland” (46). By the use of Kairos, Passarlay shows how important it is for his audience to know the refugees’

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