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

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