When The Emperor Was Divine And Farewell To Manzanar

How would you feel if your home country declared you an enemy because of your heritage and physical appearance, and then forced you to live in a fenced in facility, surrounded by barbed wire, similar to prison, for four years? On February 19, 1942, this exact event took place, and 110,000 to 120,000 Japanese Americans were forced out of their homes and into internment camps located around the country. In the novels When the Emperor was Divine, a fiction piece written by Julie Otsuka, and Farewell to Manzanar, a non-fictitious book written by Jeanne Wakatsuki Houston, the authors describe the lives and struggles Japanese families faced while living in these places. Even though the two novels use different rhetorical strategies throughout the

Prior to her family’s life in this confined facility, Jeanne spoke of her father with high regard and as someone who was both civil and hardworking. Nevertheless, as the novel progresses her opinion of her father changes dramatically as he becomes lazy, and abusive towards the family due to camp life. On one occasion, Jeanne describes how her frustrated and drunken Papa, “Yelled and shook his fists and with his very threats forced her [Mama] across the cluttered room until she collided with one of the steel bed frames and fell back onto a mattress” (Houston 68). The author includes this short scene in her text in order to invoke sympathy and pity from her audience, which appeals to pathos. and to. She uses this strategy to provide an example that sticks with the reader, because it evokes emotions, and because it demonstrates the contrast characters before and while in the camps, which emphasize the central idea of the novel. In summary, by doing so she is also able to clarify how the camps changed the lives of these people because it makes the readers feel more attached to the story and therefore have a better understanding of the author’s goals and

During one example at the beginning of the novel, the woman, one of the main characters in the story, notices multiple “evacuation order” signs placed around town, which prompts her to run a few errands and then return home to begin packing for her family and herself. Once, completing these tasks she goes to the kitchen, prepares some food in a bowl and then goes to her backyard in order to fetch the family dog, also known as White Dog. After completing his meal, the woman commands the dog to “play dead.” As he lies with his limp paws in the air, she grabs the shovel leaning against the tree, “Lifted it high in the air with both hands and brought the blade down swiftly on his head” (Otsuka 11), killing the dog. The author incorporates the killing of the White Dog, in order to portray a deeper meaning, also known as symbolism. More specifically, she uses White Dog to suggest to the idea that the “white American” part of the character is now being changed, or killed off, due to forced migration into Japanese-American camps. In addition, throughout the book, the color “white,” along with references to the “White Dog” are incorporated to expand the reader’s understanding of the situation experienced by these people and to show how they were compelled to dissimilate from their American culture and into one that no longer represented themselves,