Rhetorical Devices Used In Where I Live And What I Lived For

Time: about 70 minutes

“Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!” once stated by Thoreau. Henry David Thoreau was a simple man with a simple life. He yearned for simplicity. He was a very wise man as well. In his piece of writing “ Where I Lived and What I Lived For” Thoreau explains a life of simplicity separated from the complexity of society. In “Where I Live and What I lived For” Thoreau most effectively appeals to pathos through the use of allusion, similes, and imagery. Throughout “Where I Lived and What I Lived for”, Thoreau uses allusion to evoke pathos. The first allusion Thoreau uses in “Where I Lived and What I Lived For” is, “...fable tells us that we were long ago changed into men; like pygmies we fight with cranes...” (page 276).

For example, “Our life is like a German Confederacy, made of up petty states,with its boundary forever fluctuating, so that even a German cannot tell you how it is bounded at any moment.” (page 277). The German Confederacy was a group created to try to unify states. After the French Revolution things in europe got hectic. By creating the German Confederacy they tried to make everything easier and bring things back to order, but it ended up causing more of a problem. By using this simile, Thoreau was saying that life is much more complicated than it has to be. He gives the feeling of being ludicrous. That people complicate their lives with little things that don’t really matter much to the bigger picture. Another example in the text is, “ Let us spend one day as deliberately as Nature, and not be thrown off the track by every nutshell and mosquito’s wing that falls on the rails.” (page 280). What Thoreau is saying is the we should spend one day just being, as in living life without complications. Spend one day not getting off track and making it complicated by little things that don’t matter. Thoreau uses similes to compare life of humans to simpler things to show that we too, do not have to be complicated. But yet we are so he uses similes to clarify his

He uses imagery to show how complicated people make life; how much of life is unnecessary. In turn, it evokes emotional responses from the readers. An example is, “ Hardly a man takes a half-hour’s nap after dinner, but when he wakes he holds up his head and asks, “what’s the news?” as if the rest of man kind had stood his sentinels. Some give directions to be waked every half-hour, doubtless for no other purpose; and then, to pay for it, they tell what they have dreamed. After a night‘s sleep the news is as indispensable as the breakfast. “Pray tell me anything new that has happened to a man anywhere on this globe”-- and he reads it over his coffee and rolls, that a man has had his eyes gouged out this morning on the Wachito River; never dreaming the while that he lives in the dark unfathomed mammoth cave of this world, and has but the rudiment of an eye himself.” (page 278). In this part of the text Thoreau explains the life of a man. In the end however, it turns into a sorrowful ending. What Thoreau was trying to say in this part of the text is that people could go experience things themselves instead of listening to stories. Instead of staying home and asking what is happening with the world, you could experience it yourself and that it is unnecessary to hear the stories in the