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William Faulkner Rhetorical Analysis

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In William Faulkner Delivers Address to the Graduating Class at University High School in Oxford, Faulkner aimed to motivate the students as they embark on the adventures of life. Faulkner’s speech also shines light on the political climate of his time. Faulkner speech was delivered affectively as he demonstrated numerals appeals. Faulkner opens is speech with a powerful quote full of both ethos and pathos from a Henri Estienne followed by an explanation. The quote says, ”If youth knew; if age could.” and after reciting the quote Faulkner told the listener that the meaning. “We all know what he meant: that when you are young, you have the power to do anything, but you don’t know what to do.” I believe the way he analyzed the quote not only struck emotion, but also made himself someone else in the crowd, not William Faulkner the American writer and Nobel Prize winner. The quote may have been simple but is very meaningful. It helps set …show more content…

During this portion of the speech Faulkner mentioned something that I believe was full of ethos and pathos as well. “What threatens us today is fear. Not the atom bomb, nor even fear of it, because if the bomb fell on Oxford tonight, all it could do would be to kill us, which is nothing, since in doing that, it will have robbed itself of its only power over us: which is fear of it, the being afraid of it.” With that being said, I made the hypothesis that Faulkner was encouraging the students that even though fear is something that stares everyone in the face, one can not let it affect one’s future. I made that conclusion about the previous quote after referring to another quote in the speech that says, “Our danger is the forces in the world today which are trying to use man’s fear to rob him of his individuality, his soul, trying to reduce him to an unthinking mass by fear and bribery”, which also reiterates that fear should determine one’s

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