Rhetorical Analysis of Cheryl
A woman has a lot to offer. She walks alone for most of the hike taken through the troublesome PCT, where she experiences different trails from her perspective. The various people she met made a difference in her journey of life. In her journey, she came up with another solo hiker who managed to teach her on the pace of walking. While the different encounters were seen as short, they managed to change the mood that she had of regret to one of resilience, which played a critical role in her continuing to hike. The experience taught her the principles and the types of the journey she would encounter.
On her trip, there were a lot of ironies employed. She kept her bag overloaded. In this chapter, the main speaker is Cheryl, who wrote the book in the past tense. The use of past tense plays a critical role in helping her reflect on the past and looking back at the journey she had after she had completed it. The first occasion that made Strayed to write the book was the death of her mother, whom she refers to as “the magical force who was at the center of the family and who kept the invisible continuously spinning with the use of a powerful form of orbit existing around her.” There is no clear audience of the book due to the style of writing used. However, the audience intended is the young adults, especially the majority who have felt the pain of encountering a loss and do not have the criteria of building themselves back after the first experience of losing a loved one.
After reading through the chapter, I can say that two rhetorical appeals appear prominently used by the author. The commonly used are ethos (speaker) and logos, which are for the (message). However, ethos is the most important one because the speaker is Strayed, and the story generally revolves around the personal experience she had and her feelings after losing a mother. The message is also a crucial part of the whole chapter. Cheryl tries to look back on the actions she had carried out after the death of her mother (which included cheating on her husband and the cheating had taken place multiple times, which later resulted in ending the marriage). Cheryl can get the message across what she wanted to do to change her lifestyle by deciding to make herself better through hiking in the PCT (Pacific Crest Trail).
Cheryl uses several strategies of rhetorical experiences to portray her thoughts she had in the motel. First, the readers can see a continuous shift of tone when trying to describe her own experience. There is a telling difference when she is in the motel where her mood was very anxious, which shows that she was racing her entire mind before trying to set out for a journey that she had unprepared for. When she describes how her marriage ended because of her unfaithfulness, she tries to write the story from a somber and regretful tone. For example, she vividly describes how her friends handled the separation between her husband and Cheryl. Despite the chance of writing the entire story using the past tense, the readers have the opportunity to tell the different events. In this chapter, she makes two separate occasions to flow well together.
The most effective stylistic element used in this chapter by Cheryl is diction. In many cases, Cheryl would tell her story in thought out and very structured sentences. Additionally, when she wants to do an emphasis on a certain point, she adds humor to the mentioned statement. In many cases, she would break the sentences used into two parts and then try to separate them into specific periods. When she reflected on her experience by the use of backpacking, she tries to portray it as “I’d never have walked into the wilderness alone with the backpack placed on, and they spend the night. I would not do that even once.”
Further, to put more emphasis on how the death of her mother impacted her life, she has employed the use of repetition and diction, where she says, “My mother was dead. My mother was dead. My mother was dead. Everything that I had imagined happening about myself had disappeared into the crack of her existing last breath (34).” Not only is the sentence appearing to be heartbreaking, but it is also made to look so through sufficient repetition. This shows that Strayed herself would not believe that her mother was truly dead, and the situation kept reminding her of the unfortunate truth.
Overall, the rhetorical strategies used by Cheryl help her to achieve the purpose she intended for writing. Her writing is generally raw and always uses a self-reflective approach, which then makes the story to be more exciting because the readers can recount on her past experiences. After reading through, I learned one rhetorical lesson which involves the integration of events into the previous story and the present in trying to enhance the information portrayed in the story and taking it to the next level.