Discuss the Author’s Purpose and Identify the Rhetorical Choices That He or She Makes to Convey That Purpose

Rhetorical Analysis

Discuss the author’s purpose and identify the rhetorical choices that he or she makes to convey that purpose.

Mead’s purpose within this passage was to convey how a person’s life depends solely on what conditions they were born into because this will determine the kind of life that they end up living. Mead used simile, anaphora, and antithesis in order to convince the reader of her point. The simile helps the reader into understanding how a newborn child is viewed in the Arapesh culture. The use of anaphora shows the reader how there are many different factors that can contribute to a person’s quality of life. The author uses antithesis in a slightly similar way as the anaphora in order to describe the different types of situations that may affect a child.

The simile that Mead chooses to use is put there in order to teach the reader how this particular people, the Arapesh, viewed a newborn baby because they saw it in their own unique way. The simile is, “The response was as slight as that of the blind to the different feel on sunlight sifted through threes with different kinds of leaves, yet it was there.” This simile is saying that the shift in the attitude of the people in response to a newborn child was very small and almost imperceptible, but nevertheless, it was still there. This connects to the author’s purpose because it gives an example of a unique trait about the Arapesh that will make their children different from others. This is one of the unique conditions that determine how they will grow up and what type of person they will be.

Mead intertwined the use of antithesis and anaphora when she listed many different situations that will affect a child’s life. Some examples of the use of antithesis are, “boy or girls”, “firstborn or lastborn”, “eldest…or...younger”, “to speak