Rhetorical Analysis Of The Devil In The White City By Erik Larson

In the late 1800’s America began to take on its own individual identity as a country. The Chicago World's Fair was a great influence for that notion. In Erik Larson’s The Devil in the White City he tells a duel nonfictional storyline of one of the fair’s architects and a serial killer living just outside the fair. By using imagery, juxtaposition, and syntax Larson is able to enchant the reader and make the novel read like a fiction.

Larson writes about and described events, places, and people that were visually unique and sometimes seem outlandish by using imagery .Chicago had people calling it the Black City partly due to the visual contrast to the White City, the fair. This Black City had “smoke filled caverns between buildings…”(Larson

The overall structure of the novel juxtaposed the two different stories by going back and forth from chapter to chapter. This made the events that occurred between each chapter gain suspense and add interest. This style also had a good versus evil comparison happen. The two main people being described are Burnham, the good, and Holmes, the evil, have completely different goals. Holmes is a serial killer who simply “was enjoying himself… was testing his power to bend the lives of people” (355), yet Burnham is an architect that wants to show the world what he can do. Holmes and his victims are even compared with the viewpoints from both Holmes and from the victim. One example of this is when the women he is courting is locked up in a safe and her experience is described as well as his at the same time. Olmstead and Burham show a contrast of their old ideals versus the other architects forward thinking new age ideas . Even some of the smaller events are juxtaposed. The mixing of both the famous celebrities of the time and the commoners opinion of the fair, and the conflict between the fairs committees’ naive attitude toward how much is required for some of the tasks of the fair and Burnham’s awareness of how these projects play out. This back to back comparison writing style led to the book seeming to be more setup and not a historical