The Last Lecture: Randy Pausch
I just started reading The Last Lecture by Randy Pausch and I am already close to being done. Despite it being a rather short read, it is an extremely intriguing story. It is an autobiography about Randy Pausch's life after he was diagnosed with cancer. The book is a serious of stories about his life that he wants to pass down to his children since he knows he will not be alive for the majority of their childhood. The variety of rhetorical devices used in the Last Lecture are astonishing to me. The way Pausch uses pathos is unlike anything I have ever read. The point of his lecture is not to make the audience pity him or feel bad for him, and he's not trying to gain sympathy from his readers. He uses pathos in a way that's so realistic, and it really tug at my emotions without me even recognizing that he's using a rhetorical device. When you're reading for the purpose of finding rhetorical devices, and you don't pick up on one when it's right in front of you, to me, means that the author's writing is so genuine and sincere. His diction and the way he organizes his sentences is what makes this book so fascinating to me. He is able to tell a story in a serious yet comical, emotional yet stable, and calm yet loud way. I think his purpose is not only to have something to pass down to his children, but also to allow readers to see how important life is, and how important it is that you cherish your life every single day because one moment it all can change. His purpose is to allow readers to reassess the "important things" in life. And to me, that is a very difficult yet very powerful task, and Pausch completed it with perfection.
Rhetorical Devices:
Metaphor
Diction
Tone
Pathos
Ethos
Parallelism (having everything one day to dying the next: differences in his life)
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