A. Ackerman
English 1C
March 27, 2012
Rhetoric
“ Everything you do to us will happen to you; we are your teachers, as you are ours. We are one lesson.” This quote is from the essay, “Am I blue?” by Alice Walker which is about her expericance on a ranch and the way her relationship with a horse named Blue becomes more than a helpless pet stuck in a small acre ranch, to real strong relationship that animals such as Blue, do have feelings like humans do and she finds her self wondering why we don’t fight to keep these animals alive instead of sitting down to eat dinner with them, which doesn’t mean eating with them but eating them. During the reading of Walkers essay the rhetoric concepts came up which are three ideas, ethos meaning characters or who has authority figure in the passage, pathos that means the emotional connection, and then logos the logic behind the passage. Walkers, usage of all three concepts pathos, ethos, and logos are clearly used well in her essay.
In the essay, the usage of pathos was clearly there with the idea of Alice not being able to eat the dinner on her table at the end of the essay. “I am eating misery, I thought, as I took the first bite. And spit it out.” this is usage of pathos is well because it shows Walker emotion to what she is eating. It shows that her connection to Blue is very strong to her and in her mind the thought of trying to at meat or trying to eat some sort of animal by product will not settle well with her. She shows that she even spits the food out, that the imagine of her not even willing to swallow it hurts because she realizes that these animals are what we need in life and we need to take care of animals instead of eating them, to stand up for them.
Next in the essay, her usage of ethos was used well, as well. She was able to justify that she had first had experience with Blue and why she turned to become a small little activist of her own. “I first saw our closest neighbor, a large white