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diff --git a/jones-la/paret.tex b/jones-la/paret.tex index 8e0a9ad..ab6bed5 100644 --- a/jones-la/paret.tex +++ b/jones-la/paret.tex @@ -14,6 +14,51 @@ AP Lang \centerline{\fourteenrm Paret Essay}\baselineskip=28pt\par} %%Content +’ +Award-winning writer Norman Mailer, in his essay The Death of Benny Paret, +specifies the emotional effect of Benny Paret’s death during a welterweight +fight. Mailer’s purpose is to induce a sense of sympathy for Paret and to +illustrate the fight’s brutality and sheer emotional impact. He adopts a +disturbed tone in order to prove that Paret’s death was a brutal combination of +Griffith’s overzealousness and crowd complicity to his audience of sports fans. +Mailer’s disturbed tone starts to build with ``began to wilt'' and ``three +disgusted steps away,'' which both develop the sense that Paret’s situation is +perilous. Additionally, he uses the pace of his writing to create such a tone. +Because the tone builds throughout the essay, he starts with a general, +historical pace meant to provide general background, but begins to use more +``instantaneous'' glances at the fight as it goes on. For example, he summarizes +several rounds at the beginning but then talks about the specific content of +the eight round (a slowing of the pace of the essay). + +Shortly after that, Mailer uses short, punchy sentences like ``Paret got trapped +in a corner'' to convey that, from Mailer’s subjective viewpoint, time got +slower and the emotional impact got greater. Mailer’s diction also tracks with +thin trend, changing from simpler declaratives like ``won'' or ``clubbing punch,'' +he writes ``tangled on the wrong side of the rope'' and ``ready to rip the life +out of.'' + +Mailer, near the end of the second paragraph, uses much of his language to +pinpoint how he ``was hypnotized.'' He uses words such as ``uncontrollable'' and +``demolishing'' to create a sense of Griffith’s destructive power, and Mailer +uses pacing to induce the idea of hypnotism: ``his trainer… his manager, his cut +man'' makes it sound like the event of four people trying to stop Griffith sound +much slower than it actually took. The tone of mesmerisation Mailer uses to +demonstrate how quickly Paret’s death occurred—him being alive one second and +dead the next—feeds into the tone of disgust: the sheer focus on one man’s +death realizes the emotional impact and Mailer’s internal dilemma of being ``not +ten feet away'' and wondering how complicit he was in the brutal act of violence +which just occurred. Mailer even verbalizes the pace he intends with ``went down +more slowly than any fighter,'' which brings the tension and the tone of disgust +to a peak. The realism of Mailer’s writing, specifically in the last paragraph +where he qualifies every movement of Paret’s fall and his own emotional +response (``as if he were saying `I didn't know I was going to die'\thinspace'') +elevates the disgust Mailer relays in the passage. + +That disgust is generated by using increasingly detailed sentences throughout +the passage to slow the pace of the essay and a number of highly emotional +words or phrases. Mailer wants his audience to comprehend that fighting is +savage and that the audience of a given fight (Mailer) shares blame with the +fighters themselves for the intrinsic violence. \bye |