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Holden Rohrer
Jones
AP Lang
4 Nov 2019
\centerline{\fourteenrm Paret Essay}\baselineskip=28pt\par}

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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
