Rhetorical Analysis of Tom Wolfe’s “Putting Daddy on”

Rhetorical Analysis of Tom Wolfe’s “Putting Daddy On” By: Robert Gribschaw Tom Wolfe sets the stage for discussion with his words in the essay “Putting Daddy On.” Every reader can relate to this story because the topic of life is very general. Everyone is responsible for his or her own actions and the decision each chooses to make is their lifestyle. Although it is ultimately up to the individual to create his or her own lifestyle, there are often major influences, like parents that aid in lifestyle creation. The father son relationship is a complex bond and Tom Wolfe clearly shows this through his writing. “Putting Daddy On” is a story that forces readers to question his or her feelings about life and how it’s meant to be lived. What is the best path to a good life? Do we do what we want, when we want because we want to, or will following these emotions lead us down a crooked path? Do we sacrifice hours, days, and sometimes even years worth of time, putting in work to accomplish what society depicts as the road to a better future, or is the timea waste in the sense that we just lost what was meant to be the better days of our lives? This is the main argument that Tom Wolfe creates when describing the father son relationship. In Tom Wolfe’s essay, “Putting Daddy On”, he uses an eloquent story line along with a unique syntax to create the argument of right vs. wrong when dealing with the human lifestyle. Tom Wolfe creates the debate of deciding what lifestyle is correct using the complex bond between father and son. As a reader I was able to relate to Tom Wolfe’s essay in a lot of ways. Growing up, I was taught that the only way to accomplish something right is to put a full effort forth into each task. My father believed that any time spent not being productive was a waste of time, and on some occasions the equivalent of a sin. As a positive note, I owe much of my success to this mentality instilled in me, but on the contrary, I became burnt out of many

Cited: Wolfe,Tom. “Putting Daddy On.”The Best American Essays Of The Centry.Ed Joyce C. Otes And Robert Atwan. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000. 280-287