Rhetorical Analysis Of Self-Reliance By Ralph Waldo Emerson

For most of a person’s young life they mold their mind after the influences of others that surround them. Then there comes the time in a young person’s life when the idea of self-generated thoughts is strongly encouraged, only to later be put down by the rest of society. It is as if most people have one time frame in their life when the door to a transcendentalist way of thinking is encouraged and welcomed. In Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essay ‘Self-Reliance’ he uses rhetorical strategies like repetition, logos, pathos, and ethos to influence his readers to think for themselves and not to conform to the rest of society, and also strives for society to maintain this way of thinking.

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born in 1803 to a conservative Unitarian minister who, I can imagine, was heavily influenced by what religion taught and did not encourage free thought. In Emerson’s later years he attended Harvard. It is said that the deaths of many of his loved ones had an impact on his beliefs and way of thinking. He began to teach and write about a new way of thinking that focused on one’s own thoughts without the influence of others opinions. Emerson became the central figure in the philosophy and literature group known as the Transcendentalists. Throughout his

1). This example that Emerson gives is vital because he connects to the reader by talking about well trusted figures. Once he established this connection he explains how all of society is able to think like these idols, and goes on to explain that these idols did not gain their intelligence and insight from others but from their own