Rhetorical Analysis
The Imperial Bedroom by Jonathan Franzen is primarily about privacy and how America has reacted to the addition and deduction of privacy. Franzen makes a very convincing case that we were overreacting in a big way to our fears that we would lose our privacy. He uses a mixture of sentence structure which helps to raise your thought on the subject, and then answer the short sentence with an explanation in a longer one.
Throughout this essay, we see much of Franzen’s sarcastic ways which helps to give a lightened mood to this very serious topic. He made it a point to make a statement that seems to be very true and convincing, but he soon after, he would add in a sentence that makes you think much differently about the prior quote or sentence. It helps to go with his implied concept that Americans are easily influenced by their surroundings. I began to question myself on how I felt on the issue and got very indecisive at many points of this essay which helps further Franzen’s implied concept that we are easily influenced.
Franzen begins his essay by stating that the panic over privacy is the important thing in everyone’s life for only a few days here or a few days there. Although people may feel extremely intruded upon at times, nobody ever feels neither the need nor the courage it takes to stand up and state the facts about what they feel and why they feel this way. He begins his argument based on the Clinton/Lewinsky Starr Report. And what he argues is that this most private of information is coming out of the most public of offices (or the most “imperial of bedrooms”). If such private information can be released from what is supposed to be the most private and protected of offices, how much easier should it be that it comes out of his unprotected home? This gives you a very worrisome feel to the text because Franzen describes a very specific scenario from a very specific place. By describing something so exact, it gives you a mental picture thus
Throughout this essay, we see much of Franzen’s sarcastic ways which helps to give a lightened mood to this very serious topic. He made it a point to make a statement that seems to be very true and convincing, but he soon after, he would add in a sentence that makes you think much differently about the prior quote or sentence. It helps to go with his implied concept that Americans are easily influenced by their surroundings. I began to question myself on how I felt on the issue and got very indecisive at many points of this essay which helps further Franzen’s implied concept that we are easily influenced.
Franzen begins his essay by stating that the panic over privacy is the important thing in everyone’s life for only a few days here or a few days there. Although people may feel extremely intruded upon at times, nobody ever feels neither the need nor the courage it takes to stand up and state the facts about what they feel and why they feel this way. He begins his argument based on the Clinton/Lewinsky Starr Report. And what he argues is that this most private of information is coming out of the most public of offices (or the most “imperial of bedrooms”). If such private information can be released from what is supposed to be the most private and protected of offices, how much easier should it be that it comes out of his unprotected home? This gives you a very worrisome feel to the text because Franzen describes a very specific scenario from a very specific place. By describing something so exact, it gives you a mental picture thus