Rhetorical Analysis Of How To Make The Best Of Life By Samuel Butler

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In “How to Make the Best of Life”, Samuel Butler depicts life as a narrative in progress. “Life is like playing a violin solo in public and learning the instrument as one goes on”. In life, our story is our violin solo and our instruments are our lips. We each tell or perform our own stories. We learn from our lives, as we live them. In the excerpt from this speech Butler uses metaphors and similes to relate life as a positive narrative, he often used rhetorical questions to open the minds of his audience to show that like can have various feelings but you only get one.

Butler also depicts life as a feeling, whether it’s good or bad. “Life is not life unless we can feel it, and a life limited to a knowledge of such fraction of our work as may happen to survive us is no true life in other people; salve it as we may, death is not life any more than black is white”. Butler encourages his audience not to sleepwalk through life, but to take action. He trying to get through his audience’s head that life is what you make it but in order to have any affect you have to take risks, make decisions, and explore options. His quote should inspire, us as individuals to take control of our lives. To go beyond the idea of what we have limited ourselves to accomplish or believe we can achieve. …show more content…

Throughout the speech he states questions such as “In whose consciousness does their truest life consist–their own, or ours?”. The question above basically means who are you living for? Are you holding back because you are worried about what the next person thinks? Butler wants to prove to the audience that no matter how good or bad life is it is not worth failing to

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