Argument Analysis 5

Analysis6 (Class reference, I skipped one.)

3-24-16

Kendal Gast

            Foer establishes his ethos at the beginning of his book by telling short stories or snapshots of his life up to the point of his son being born.  Most readers, he imagines, have a grandmother, and if they don’t, they must have some sort of womanly figure in their lives that made or did something significant upon further reflection.  This creates a shared experience between Foer and the reader.  The shared experience, then, makes the reader think that Foer knows them and if he does, the reader is more likely to pay attention. 

            Foer demonstrates his good moral character by (doing that thing that Aristotle or whoever said it) by making it seem like he is an everyday, common man who makes mistakes just like the readers.  On page 13 he writes “To be perfectly honest (and to risk losing credibility on page 13), I assumed, before beginning my research, that I knew what I would find – not the details but the general picture”.  Foer says that he would lose credibility by admitting his preconceived notions of a bad ending, thus making the book even more like a case for vegetarianism.  But Foer says the book isn’t a case for vegetarianism.  It is a work of factual journalism made actually meaningful by placing the facts into a story.  Foer builds up his intelligence by mentioning he used widely available, supposedly accurate government figures and then had two fact-checkers make sure everything came out alright in the end.

            Foer most likely imagines his audience as those that have already thought of the factory farming model - if they even think for a little bit about where their meat comes from and actually calling it chicken, cow, or pig, rather than breast, patty, or loin.  He also might imagine the audience not really knowing how meat gets to our stomachs and not know very much of anything about the food process, otherwise he wouldn’t have written the book.  An audience with concern for animals is also a possibility since Foer writes about how he was taught not to kick dogs, read children’s books with animals, and adopted a dog later in his life.  Foer also makes a universal - maybe not cliché but perhaps oversued – appeal to his audience through stories.  He argues that “stories establish narratives and stories establish rules” (12).  I think most everyone can identify with someone who talks about stories, especially if they frame them in a new light like Foer did for me. 

I’ve been thinking about stories all throughout my college career and knew they were the source of… something.  Everything?  For some reason I don’t want them to be the source of everything – mainly because I’m an awful in-person storyteller.  I always add too much detail in the wrong places and at the wrong times.  Even when I took fiction writing, both beginner and advanced, I struggled creating narratives for my characters.  I really struggled writing in a way that made my audience want to care about my characters and story.  But I wonder why stories have such an impact on humans and how each individual person really is a story, and how humans together share stories and make rules as Foer said.  They’re just stories: a beginning, middle with some action, and an end, almost always with a lesson to be learned.  I suppose they are the source of everything since they teach humans the only things they need to know.  That stuff might include how to treat another living being, what to do if you love another living being, and maybe even what to do with this thing called life we all have been given.