Cori Bensted
When change is thrust upon us, it can change people with it, but when it does, it’s important to remember where you’re from. The importance of this essay is it depicts a time in history when change occurred to a people who, willing or not, did not see the coming effect it would have. This will cover Al Pittman’s, The Day I Became A Canadian, and his point of view on how changing nationalities belittled his country. This will also examine how his writing, being rhetorical elements like sentence structure and diction, enhances his writing, bringing out more emotion in the reader.
The Day I Became A Canadian is an essay of the day Al Pittman’s nationality changed and the resulting effect that had on him and the people who experienced the same. In the beginning, he saw the changes that were occurring as exciting and he had high notions of the things that would come with it. After he explains how his notions as a child were as unrealistic as the adults during that time. Pittman as a child had expectations of miraculous changes like ideas you would find in a comic book, adults of that time had ideas that their country was changing to better help the people. What they found was a government encouraging them to leave behind their ways and adopted the new. “Then suddenly we became part of a country we hardly knew, and just as suddenly the government exhorted the people to abandon their old ways and adopt the new, to come out of their fishing boat to work in factories, to leave their homes on the island and in the coves to take up residence in the “growth centres” of the new industrial Newfoundland.” Pittman and many others came to the realization that as much as they are Canadian, they have a culture and history of their own, which many others were fighting to keep in the beginning.
Pittman uses two points of view in his essay to give the reader a better understanding. When telling of the