Uriah Witt
Professor Michael Jernigan
English 102
20 FEB 2018
The Pathos Behind Indifference
An elderly man makes his way to a podium of the White House, in attendance is President Bill Clinton and First Lady Hillary Rodham-Clinton. He had prepared a speech that will tug at the heart strings of every person in attendance, along with everyone watching from home. The date is significant to Elie Wiesel’s speech, 12 April 1999, 45 years to the day he had been liberated by American Soldiers from Buchenwald concentration camp in Nazi Germany. With sadness in his eyes and heart he delivered his speech The Perils of Indifference. Elie Wiesel spoke to the audience’s heart using pathos, using proper tone and with appropriate pauses allowing for the
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Wiesel almost immediately draws the audience in with the compelling beginning of a horrible nightmare, he uses joy and gratitude it is difficult to understand why until you see the emotional side. As the speech goes on he breaks down the word indifference to make sure the audience understands what he is speaking about, also incase there was any misconceptions of this word he says, “What is indifference? Etymologically, the word means "no difference." A strange and unnatural state in which the lines blur between light and darkness, dusk and dawn, crime and punishment, cruelty and compassion, good and evil” (Wiesel). He understood that for the audience to get emotionally attached to your speech, emotions must flow like a river. Wiesel continually brought up gratitude, joy, compassion and the children. The use of Pathos in this speech was evident throughout, the audience was in his shoes and felt his …show more content…
He wanted to the pauses to be placed during the parts of great impact and meaningfulness to himself. When he first says “indifference” (Wiesel) he speaks loudly and pauses for a short time after he says, “no difference” (Wiesel). This pause allows everyone in attendance to ponder and reflect on Wiesel’s definition of indifference. By doing this Wiesel prepared listeners for the entirety of his speech. Wiesel repeats gratitude, letting the audience know the importance of this word to himself, after the third time he will take another small pause to encourage the audience to create their own definition of gratitude. Dramatic pauses can be powerful Wiesel uses these pauses again while emphasizing “indifference” (Wiesel)and, “inhumane” (Wiesel). He spoke the words “In a way, to be indifferent to that suffering is what makes the human being inhuman.” (Wiesel) He allows the attendees to make an overall connection between indifference and inhuman. These pauses allowed him to convey his overall
Using such harsh imagery and descriptive detail when giving Wiesel's speech elicits strong emotional responses from the audience, making the audience empathetic to Wiesel’s purpose for his
Wiesel pinpoints the indifference of humans as the real enemy, causing further suffering and lost to those already in peril. Wiesel commenced the speech with an interesting attention getter: a story about a young Jewish from a small town that was at the end of war liberated from Nazi rule by American soldiers. This young boy was in fact himself. The first-hand experience of cruelty gave him credibility in discussing the dangers of indifference; he was a victim himself.
In his speech Wiesel uses his life to demonstrate its effects and to argue against the sentiment of indifference that caused him and many others to suffer. Gratitude
Living through horrific events changed people, for Wiesel, with suffering came a platform to speak out and end
Wiesel appeals to the emotions of the audience throughout his speech in order to further persuade the audience. Wiesel asks if he has “the right to represent the multitudes who have perished” and the “right to accept the great honor on their behalf” (Wiesel 2). He says he did not and that “no one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions” (2). Wiesel engages in the emotions of his audience, trying to make them feel sorrow for the hundreds of thousands of Jews that died in the Holocaust. He also says that no one person could ever
Elie Wiesel makes a speech that was very intense. Is speech was so powerful that the people just had to listen. He made two very important statements in this speech. These two statements were probably the strongest points of this speech.
Utilization of the repetition of questions allows Wiesel to make the audience ultimately feel as if they are in control of deciding what they think is morally correct. Within almost every paragraph, Wiesel asks his listeners rhetorical questions which truly have one compassionate answer. By using the questions, Wiesel manages to assist the listener in choosing his side without simply telling them what the right answer is. For example, when Wiesel asks if “the human being [has] become less indifferent and more human,” he implies that indifference in unconditionally inhumane. The question of “what will the legacy of this vanishing century be?” fills the audience with the duty of making the end of the century and the upcoming century the most
The general statement made by Elie Wiesel in his speech, The Perils of Indifference, is that indifference is sinful. More specifically, Wiesel argues that awareness needs to be brought that indifference is dangerous. He writes “Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end”. In this speech, Wiesel is suggesting that indifference is dangerous it can bring the end to many lives. In conclusion Wiesel's belief is suggesting that indifference is an end, it needs to be noticed and taken care of.
Wiesel’s use of ethos, pathos, logos, diction, and allusion certainly gives the audience information and emotions he was hoping
He also questioned if we, as humanity, have learned from the past and became less indifferent. Mr. Wiesel, brought an emotional hook to the audience by giving details regarding his suffering. At the end of the speech
When Wiesel conveys indifference in this way, he does so from the experience
Wiesel’s speech shows how he worked to keep the memory of those people alive because he knows that people will continue to be guilty, to be accomplices if they forget. Furthermore, Wiesel knows that keeping the memory of those poor, innocent will avoid the repetition of the atrocity done in the future. The stories and experiences of Wiesel allowed for people to see the true horrors of what occurs when people who keep silence become “accomplices” of those who inflict pain towards humans. To conclude, Wiesel chose to use parallelism in his speech to emphasize the fault people had for keeping silence and allowing the torture of innocent
When the young boy asks, “Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent”, (paragraph 5) again the audience is prompted to emotionally respond. They have to realize that it was all of them, all of us, who remained silent and that this silence must never happen again. Wiesel demonstrates a strong use of pathos throughout his speech to encourage his audience to commit to never sitting silently by while any human beings are being treated
Wiesel’s speech, he begins to speak of legacy and how his century will be judged by its successor, harshly so, for its cold-hearted acts against humanity; incidentally, implying a sense of pathos to appeal to his audience’s sense of moral right and wrong. Continuing, he ventures into how so many could arrive at a state of existence that could be construed as worse than death itself. “The ‘Muselmanner,’ as they were called [as Wiesel explains it] . . . lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, . . . no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst.
By listing a series of allusions, Wiesel was referencing the meaning behind the words. Wiesel’s list becomes a functional rhetorical tool because it stimulates the audience’s mind to form associations between his allusions and his topic of indifference. Without the list of allusions, Wiesel would not have had the same effect on his audience, since it created a lasting impression on the audience through the series of historical events about indifference. Wiesel had no need to elaborate on his allusions because he wanted his audience to think and remember by themselves the indifferences listed and reflect on how over time nothing has changed.