Analysis Of We Wish To Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families

Philip Gourevitch, a famous journalist for the New Yorker, in his novel We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed with Our Families: Stories from Rwanda implies that the feelings and events surrounding the Rwandan genocide were not addressed by other countries and overall he gives light to the emotions felt by the survivors and victims. Gourevitch supports this by explaining the history of the genocide, illustrating the victim’s views and emotions through interviews and their life stories and background and finally, giving cold hard facts and being extremely articulate. His purpose is to make the readers aware of the cruel actions that happened during this genocide and how it truly affected the people of Rwanda in order to inform

The irony involved in Gourevitch’s words of “...and the world sent blankets, beans, and bandages to camps controlled by the killers, apparently hoping that everybody would behave nicely in the future” (Gourevitch 170), further explains the complete naivety that people had and how absurd they were in their thinking. His diction in this conveys a very sarcastic tone which demonstrates a point that this was not the way to go about things especially with how controlled the Rwandans had become by the Hutus and how out of control everything was. This piece of irony does help further explain the next rhetorical choices that weren’t used by him but by someone he had interviewed and spoken with. An American soldier states that “‘Genocide is a cheese sandwich. I asked him how we figured that. ‘What does anyone care about a cheese sandwich?’” (170). This analogy given in the novel leaves a great impact on how this really was seen by people and exemplifies the overall theme of how little this affected people out of Rwanda and how little it meant to anyone at all. To further grasp of how horrible this event was, Gourevitch in this passage gives allusions along the lines of Hitler and the Holocaust. He references the Rwandan genocide as “the most unambiguous case of genocide since Hitler’s war against the Jews”