Writing a Rhetorical Analysis

                          Let it Snow: A Short Story by David Sedaris (Rhetorical Analysis)

                                                                        By: Cam Hall

            From the first couple of sentences of his short story, you assume that the author, David Sedaris is going to talk mainly about how little the snowfall was every winter in North Carolina in the area where he lived, when he was a child, and then how one winter he was much happier when the amount of snow that hit the ground increased by a tremendous amount. It's not difficult to figure out how joyous he was during this one significant winter, especially since, "School was cancelled, and two days later we got lucky again. There were eight inches on the ground, and rather than melting, it froze."
           But what he writes to his audience is not another story about a young child feeling grateful that a large snowfall has allowed min or her to miss school and that child enjoying the day off. In actuality, David Sedaris's main concern, especially for his audience, is of the relationship that exists between his mother and himself, plus his sisters, who are in the exact same position as he is, during a specific point in hsi life. He mainly focuses on an event that occurs during the time that he and his sisters were off from school which starts off with Sedaris stating that, "Our presence has disrupted the secret life she led while we were at school, and when she could no longer take it she threw us out. It wasn't a gentle request but something closer to an eviction." Based on this quote from the text, the audience can predict that his mother probably did not act like a witch around him and his sisters on a regular basis, since they usually were not home as often as they were during this time, when they were children. David Sedaris uses a lot of explainatory details to show how the battle between his mother and himself, plus his sisters results in a number of significant events all in the course of one day and how the feelings of himself and his sisters towards their mother change from the beginning of the battle to the end of the battle. In addition, the writer gives descriptive detail about the many significant parts of the battle to keep the audience interested and to get an emotional reaction from it, as well.
          At the beginning of the situation, the writer's mother kicks him and his sisters out of their house. The audience is quick to get an impression of how the mother is interacting with her children during this situation and how she establishes authority and superiority over them. The point in the story when the mother says, "Get the hell out of my house," and what it is followed by gives the audience this impression. This verbal statement is followed by the author's writing in which he states,"We reminded her that it was our house, too, and she opened the front door and shoved us into the carport. 'And stay out!' she shouted." This excerpt from the story gives readers a negative impression of the writer's mother and allow them to view her as abusive towards her children and feel simpathetic towards the writer and his sisters.
         The situation goes on with him and his sisters trying to find another way into the house and them yelling at their mother to let them back in, but to no avail. At one point, the audience is given a description of the mother in the house when her children are looking in on her from the outside when the writer states, "I rang the bell, and when no one answered we went to the window and saw our mother in the kitchen, watching television. Normally she waited until five o'clock to have a drink, but for the past few days she'd been making an exception." This statement can give readers the idea that the mother is definately not acting like her usual self and that she is rejecting her children to an extreme degree at this point due to her apparently unusual consumage of alcoholic beverages during this time. Eventually, their mother goes out of the room. At this point, the writer and his sisters are annoyed and frustrated with their mother, and they basically hate her guts. This is evident when one of the sisters calls their mother a swear word, which shows how angry and hateful she is towards her mother.
        After these events, the children try tossing snowballs at the house to get their mother's attention, but this also does not get them into the house any faster. Shortly after this, the writer makes up his own assumption about selfish mothers who abandoned their children like his own when he says, "Selfish mothers wanted the house to themselves and their children were discovered years later, frozen like mastodons in blocks of ice." It is possible that the writer does this purposely to make his mother out to be a horrible tyrant who deserves nothing but the worst for what she has done to her kids.
       Once the kids realize that they can't get back into their own house, the writer comes up with the idea that himself or one of his sisters should get run over by a car, as a means of making their mother regret having kicked them out of their house. Next, the siblings argue back and forth with each other over who should be the one to get hit by a car. Eventually, one of the writer's sisters, Tiffany, ends up being the one that lies out on a road in a certain location waiting for a car to come and hit her. The writer describes the event when he states that, "We chose a quiet dip between two hills, a spot where drivers were almost required to skid out of control. She took her place, this six-year-old in a butter-colored coat, and we gathered on the curb to watch." This excerpt from the text shows the audience that he is purposely using imagery to get an emotional reaction from his readers, wanting them to feel bad and sympathetic for his sister who might lose her life due to a cold-hearted mother. Luckily for Tiffany, a car comes across her lying in the road, and the driver happens to be a neighbor of the kids and he stops close to her location on the road. He gets out of the car and wonders what is going on.
       Next, Lisa, another one of the writer's sisters, explains to the man about their mother throwing them out of their own house, and he understands the whole situation. Then, a bit later on, the kids see their mother walking towards them while walking around the crest of a hill, and because of this, they assume that their neighbor told their mother of what was going on with her kids trying to see if one of them could get hit by a car with the purpose of making her regret having kicked them all out of their house. The description of the mother, as told by the writer himself, is very interesting and gives her kids and the audience a different attitude towards her. The writer states that, "She did not own a pair of pants, and her legs were buried to the calf in the snow. We wanted to send her home, to kick her out of nature just as she had kicked us out of the house, but it was hard to stay angry at someone so pitiful-looking." This statement allows the audience to feel more sympathetic towards the mother, with the impression that she probably does not have the greatest life and that she feels stressed out a lot of the time, having to take care of and support her many children all of the time. This can also imply that the mother drinks to relieve the stress that she feels having to take care of the many children that she has.
        When the mother approaches them, Lisa asks her if she is wearing her special kind of shoes, to which the mother responds by raising up a foot with no shoe on it and saying that she was wearing one on each foot not too long ago from the present moment. The writer concludes the story by stating that,"This was how things went. One moment she was locking us out of her own house and the next we were rooting around in the snow, looking for her left shoe. 'Oh, forget about it.' she said. 'It'll turn up in a few days." Gretchen fitted her cap over my mother's foot. Lisa secured it with her scarf, and, surrounding her tightly on all sides, we made our way home." This concluding statement explains to the readers how the writer and his sisters were able to forgive their mother for what she did to them and that they still love her and care for her and basically how their attitudes and feelings towards their mother completly changed. The ending also shows how the mother changed her attitude and feelings towards her kids, since she cared enough about them to go out on her own and search for them out in the cold weather, especially with little clothing for her to wear. The audience is able to have a more positive feeling for the mother at the end of the story, since she basically risked her health in order to retrieve her kids, who apparently she really did care about. In conclusion, because David Sedarus uses a lot of explainatory detail about the struggle between the writer, his siblings, and his mother, he is able to keep the audience interested in the overall plot of the story, plus allow the audience to connect to the different characters, as well as feel the same emotions that all of the characters go through in the story.