The Death Of Benny Paret Rhetorical Analysis

Novelist, Norman Mailer, in his narrative essay, “The Death of Benny Paret,” recounts his experience as he witnesses a first-hand account of the tragic death of the boxer, Benny Paret. Mailer’s purpose is to convince the audience that boxing is inhumane through the use of many rhetorical devices, such as simile, animalistic diction and syntax.

Mailer strengthens his essay and proves that boxing is bad by using many similes to help portray the uncontrollable Griffith and the unbelievable death of a champion. “Griffith was in like a cat ready to rip the life out of a huge boxed rat.” This implies that Griffith had looked like a huge animal ready to go in for the kill just before he had started hitting Paret, which proves how violent and

animal like he really was during this fight. And by saying “while he attacked , the right hand whipping like a piston rod which has broken through the crankcase or like a baseball bat demolishing a pumpkin,” vividly implants a gruesome image in the reader’s mind. Mailer suggests that Griffith’s fist is the baseball bat which is smashing through the pumpkin, which is meant to me Perat’s head. Mailer uses this simile to prove just how hard Griffith had been hitting Perat that day and to show the readers the viciousness of the opposing fighter, when he punched Paret numerous times in just a few seconds. By comparing Griffith to inanimate objects like the “piston”and the “baseball bat,” and being called an “uncontrollable beast” that couldn’t even be stopped by his handlers really suggests his nonhuman characteristics and how boxing his just animalistic in general.
Mailer creates an animalistic diction through the use of some of the violent words that he choses to use in his essaynto prove how inhumane boxing really is. Throughout the entire essay, Mailer throws in words to describe the fight he had seen between Griffith and Perat. Phrases like, “Griffith came alive and was dominating Paret…” describes how Griffith had been attacking him like an animal during the entirety of the fight. By saying, “...Griffith caught him. Paret got trapped in a corner,” makes the audience think of a situation where a beast has just backed its prey into a corner and intimidating the prey before actually going in for the kill. Mailer uses other animalistic words like, “maulings” , “dominating” , “whimpering” , “attack” , “leaped” , and “uncontrollable” to get the readers to really get a grasp on just how violent and uncivilized this fight had been.
Mailer uses syntax to really keep the readers engaged in the story so they won’t want to stop reading about this infamous fight.

The statement “Paret died on his feet” was different from his usual style of long and descriptive sentences throughout the rest of the essay. The shortness of this sentence stands out more and is very compelling to the readers. The abruptness surprises the audience and basically says that death is no big deal and that life can be thrown away in an instant. Just like the audience at the fight, the readers may have had to think twice or even three times about what had just happened, because the death had been so fast and the people watching probably didn’t even realize what had just happened right in front of them. But then right after he tells the audience that Paret has just died, he goes back to the moment that Paret was passing away in the ring. He says that “his death reached out to us. One felt it hover in the air,”. Mailer and the rest of the people that had seen the fight had obviously felt the pain that Paret had felt as he slowly sank to the ground and died. Paret had been fighting to stay alive and he “went down more slowly than any fighter had ever gone down… second by second into [his] grave.” When Paret died, it seemed to last forever. The description and the details of how Paret had slowly died even while Griffith was still attacking him convinces the audience that he had still been fighting even after he had already

passed. Mailer once again proves why he believes that boxing is just a terrible thing by informing the audience just how quickly someone can die from it.
Through Mailer’s use of multiple rhetorical devices such as similes, diction and syntax and many others, he vividly re-enacts the slow and painful death of Benny Paret and affects the audience by making them feel sympathetic, shocked and disgusted as he describes how violent and uncivilized this boxing match had been.