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@@ -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