Rhetorical Analysis Jane Welty
The Oppression of Antigua Jamaica Kincaid grew up in a world where everything she owned wasn’t hers. While she may have physically owned it, mentally she did not. As her world of Antigua was being eaten alive by England, Kincaids family loved every bit of it. In the essay, On Seeing England for the First Time, Jamaica Kincaid uses several literary elements to explore her negative feelings towards England and England’s influence in Antigua. Three of the main elements used in the essay are structure, ethos, and diction. Structure plays a role in the power of this essay by the way the author presents ideas. Kincaid employs the method of increasing importance to bring her points home. By beginning the essay with herself in a classroom the reader gets a firm foundation of setting, time, place, etc. She describes seeing the map of England and the very first thoughts that go through her head. She then tells about the people that got to wear it and where they wore it and how it effected her life. With each story Kincaid tells, she is also using increasing importance in conjunction with ethos to make the reader feel as she did. She tells further stories about her childhood experiences that make the reader feel England’s oppression and begin to hate what was happening themselves. She tells of her fathers hat and how he wore it everyday from the second he got up to the second he went to bed shows exactly how much some people cared for England and how they were falling under its spell. The reader feels as though England is forcing this upon them and emotions are felt towards the subject. Each story gets more relevant and more powerful, causing increased importance and increased hatred. A third method used in the essay is diction, which is used to show how great the oppression of Antigua had become. Almost everything in Antigua was made in England, ranging from socks to the idea of eating a large breakfast. England had encompassed almost everything in Antigua and most