Falling Man Analysis

Pure Wisdom: A Rhetorical Analysis Very little has been written about the over two-hundred plus people who jumped to their deaths from the World Trade Center Towers on September 11, 2001. There came a moment, as they clung to those windows high above the streets of New York with the unbearable heat and smoke drawing near, that they chose to jump, and in that moment of complete surrender they became graceful sacred angels returning to their source. “Falling Man” is an article focusing on the identity of one of these jumpers depicted in a well-known photograph taken by Richard Drew. The article is composed of numerous rhetorical devices that eventually give way to the author’s arguments towards the photograph. Utilization of rhetoric in the article allows a better understanding of the writer and its intended audience. The search for the man who fell seeming to embrace his fate in the article only begins to reveal the maturity of its audience and the personal characteristics of the writer. One of the major rhetorical devices used, parallelism, is evident within each paragraph of the article to provide more emphasis and further strengthen the points made by the author. The author constantly uses “him” and “he” in the beginning of each sentence of the first paragraph to direct attention to the details of the image itself. The use of those distinct descriptions make the falling man different from the rest of the jumpers, and it provides a unique connection to various viewers of the image. More specifically, repetition in a sentence of paragraph seven focuses on the motives behind jumping and the action itself; “Americans responding to the worst terrorist attack in the history of the world with acts of heroism, with acts of sacrifice, with acts of generosity, with acts of martyrdom, and, by terrible necessity, with one prolonged acts of mass suicide” (par. 7). The jumpers' actions are clearly respected and seen as patriotic. Therefore, sympathy towards