Rhetorical Strategies

Blog Topic #1: Rhetorical Strategies
• Personification: “The last rains lifted the corn quickly and scattered weed colonies (1)”
• Alliteration: “hooves of the horses,” “high heavy clouds,” “sluggish smoke” (2)
• Anaphora: “where the teams moved, where the wheels milled (2)”
• Personification & Simile: “white road that waved gently like a ground swell. (10)”
• Simile: “like little armadillos,” like elephant legs,” “like a tiddly-wink” (10-11)
• Simile: “like a pork pie lay on the ground beside him (18) “like a stud horse in a bow stall,” “howlin’ like a dog-wolf in moon time,” “like a sow litterin’ broken bottles” (28)
• Oxymoron: “cleansing dust (33)”
• Rhetorical Question: “Don’t they make explosives out of cotton? And uniforms? (32)”
• Epistrophe: “being born on it, working on it, dying on it (33)”
• Symbolism: “dust-blanketed land (4)”
John Steinbeck’s use of similes often relates humans to animals, which reflects his simplistic and informal style. The comparison to animals gives off a sense of uncivilized actions especially during the time of great economic hardship. The lives of people that have been affected by the Great Depression have been deluged with stress and hardship; however their hardship and stress seem more magnified when it is related to the simpler lives of animals. The Grapes of Wrath takes place in Oklahoma, where dust was a common item to encounter. The reoccurring presence of dust symbolizes the pain and suffering that will always cover the land. The dust reflects Steinbeck’s simplistic style because dust is a very small and very common item and yet he uses its presence as a huge burden in the lives of the Oklahoma residents.