Write an essay in which you rhetorically analyze Max Porter’s portrayal of grief in the novel.

Write an essay in which you rhetorically analyze Max Porter’s portrayal of grief in the novel. You will observe a pattern in the text and argue for its significance. Your pattern might consist of Crow’s language, the boys shared and individual perspectives, memory, time, stages of grief, moving on, storytelling, inheritance, fables etc. You may either focus on a few entries in detail or trace a theme, language, rhetorical device or symbol throughout the text. What argument is Max Porter making about grief’s identity? Cite examples from the text and show HOW they function to support your argument. Avoid summary. Ensure that your interpretation is grounded in the text. Consider the speaker, diction (word choice), sentence structure, tone (author’s attitude toward the subject), imagery, repetition, allusions and context within the text and outside of it. (For example, you might consider where a passage falls within the order of entries, as well as Max Porter’s own life story or the legacy of Ted Hughes’ Crow.) You do not need to consider all of these factors, your analysis must be grounded in the specifics of the language.
Choose 3-5 entries of Citizen to rhetorically analyze. Consider each entry’s historical and cultural context as well as context within the narrative, the speaker—Rankine as well as any other artist, the subject, the intended audience, symbols, language and the rhetorical appeals (logos, pathos, ethos) to identify the author’s purpose—either implicit or explicit. You do not need to include all of these considerations, but you do need to connect your specific observations about the text (rhetorical devices) to a hypothesized significance (the author’s purpose).
Your identification of the author’s purpose might relate to one of Citizen’s themes: memory, invisibility and hyper-visibility, the historical self and the personal self, micro-aggression and aggression, unspoken language, othering, words, the body, you vs. I, anger etc.

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