The Great Dictator Analysis

In the famous final speech of Charlie Chaplin’s film The Great Dictator, released in 1940, it is clear that the speaker put forward an advocacy of democracy and against tyranny. Using Kenneth Burke’s pentad as a means of analyzing this speech allows for better understanding who he places blame on and what he advocates. Moreover, Kenneth Burke’s pentad also aids in understanding the relationships between the five components of the pentad, as well as which one becomes the determinant in every part of the speech, told from the twenty ratios made up with the five components. In this final paper, I would use the model of Burke’s dramatistic pentad to tentatively explore the rhetorical motivation behind Charlie Chaplin’s speech.

The film The Great Dictator tells a story of a Jewish barber, who joins the army during the First World War, and is sent to the hospital because of an injury. Adenoid Hynkel is the dictator of the country, and he has a cruel policy towards Jews. The barber is put into prison and later escapes wearing the army uniform. The soldiers mistake him for

Hynkel, to whom he is nearly identical in appearance, and ask him to make a victory speech. Conversely, the real Hynkel is mistaken for the barber and arrested. The barber makes a rousing speech, calling for humanity to break free from dictatorships. The splendid performance of Charlie Chaplin sticks in people’s minds, and the speech has become a classic.
In order to know how Burke’s pentad could work in Chaplin’s speech, the theory of “dramatism” is the first important to be introduced. Dramatism, a philosophy of language, is adopted by Burke to probe how the language functions in the discourse and how language forms construct and imply the motives of human being (Burke). He develops a perspective for probing motivation that treats language and the primarily as the modes of action. That is to say, the center of dramatism is the terms of an agreement on human behavior, which form the terministic screen to specify the presentation of the reality by means of terms (Smith).
Dramatism is the name he defines to his own system of analysis. Just once Shakespeare writes that the whole world is like a big stage and everyone is the actor or actress. Burke introduces concept “drama” in his new rhetoric aiming to construct a model to analyze human actions and compare the human relations to the drama’s mode (Burke). This mode is in accordance with his definition of man which is the symbol-using animal. Language plays an indispensable role in this kind of “animal” who show his daily performance in the scene of drama (Burke).
The criticism that used for this investigation is the dramatist pentad proposed by Kenneth Burke. The pentadic criticism contributes to our understanding of what a rhetor’s real motives are and how this person uses rhetoric to shape worldviews that audience can accept (Foss 355). Published in Burke’s A Grammar of Motives in 1945, the pentad contains five elements: act, agent, agency, scene and purpose, which corresponds to the terms in journalistic writing when describing a story or event: who, what, why, when and where (Smith 325). According to Burke, the “who” is the agent who delivers a speech and explains idealist dreams and inspire audience; the “what” is the act in the pentad, meaning the actions that a speaker takes during a speech; the “why” is the purpose of a speech with various goals of taking certain actions; the “when” and “where” refer to the scene in the pentad, identifying the time and the location where a speech takes place. Additionally, the “agency” that is not on the list of the elements in journalist writing represents the “how”－how the act is accomplished in a speech. These five fundamental components are not individual units; instead, they are linked together as the mechanism for discovering a rhetor’s real intentions in a speech (Burke).
“Scene,” refers to the specific time and place for the actual delivery of the speech, and also includes the audience and audience’s values that match or differ from the values that the speaker tries to convey (Burke). The scene in this film takes place during the Second World War and on the way of the Jewish barber escaping to Osterlich frontier from persecution. The audience in the film is the large crowd of soldiers and civilians who listen to his speech. From outside the film, the film was released and the speech was given in about 1940, during the outbreak of the Second World War. The film was shot in the United States, where it was still formally at peace with Nazi Germany at that time, but stood on the brink of entry into The Second World War. The audience are tens of thousands of movie watchers, including people from all over the world.
“Agent,” refers to the group or individual who performs the act (Burke).

Considering this speech as a part of the film, the agent of the speech is the Jewish barber, who escapes to Osterlich frontier from persecution and is mistaken as Adenoid Hynke the great dictator. If the screenplay of the speech is regarded, however, the agent is Charles Chaplin, a famous actor and filmmaker, who also wrote, produced, scored, directed and starred in the film The Great Dictator.

“Act” is to deliver the address by the agent (Burke). In the film, the barber makes a rousing speech, calling for humanity to break free from dictatorships. And outside the film, reflecting on the tragic consequences of the First World War, Chaplin made an appeal for peace and against war. He also used this film to bring to light the Nazi Germany’s inhumanity and violence, as well as criticize and satirize Hitler’s brutality and

tyranny.