Friday Night Lights

The book "Friday Night Lights", is a book about a team of high school football players; all with different characters, personalities, and situations. The town of Odessa, in Texas is where the story begins and takes place in. To some of the players, football is just a game and for others, it is much more. To portray the mood and feeling that there is more than what meets the eye, Bissinger uses various rhetorical strategies throughout writing the book; however the strategies that are more often seen throughout is his use of pathos, ethos, and his way of structuring. The structure and the way Bissinger has arranged the book shows that even though the football team was unified and one, each player had a different personality, different situation, and different aspirations. Bissinger dedicates a chapter for each of the main characters (players) of the football team. The reader begins to learn about the students as he/she reads more into the book. In " Boobie", you learn about Boobies injury, and that he has committed his life and put in his all for football. However due to his injured knee, the reader realizes that his dreams will be stopped from numerous obstacles along the way (Bissinger 53). Another example where he uses that structure strategy is in "The Ambivalence of Ivory" and "Dreaming of Heroes", where Bissinger depicts the hardships of Ivory and Mike. Ivory loves to hate the game and most of the times wants to run away from it because he detests the meetings, practices, etc. He throws up before every game to "rid of" any demons. The reader learns of Mike, the quarterback of the football team. His biggest struggle is his lack of confidence and low self esteem. As the story progresses, the reader begins to feel affection for each of the players and gets excited for the games they have won and the disappointed for the games they have lost. At the end of the book Bissinger includes an "Afterward" that describes how each player ended up and how they lived their