Self Reliance :: essays research papers

The essay Self-Reliance, by Ralph Waldo Emerson, is a persuasive essay promoting the ways of transcendentalism. He uses this paper to advance a major point use a structure that helps his argument. In the paper, Emerson begins his concluding thoughts with a statement that greater self-reliance will consider a revolution. He then applies this idea to society and all of its aspects, including religion, education, and art. This brings Emerson to a new, more precise focus on how society never advance, rather it recedes on one side as fast as it gains on the other. This shocking, yet intriguing, idea is supported and augmented using tone, metaphor, example, and the consequence of ignoring his opinion. The final result is a conglomeration of ideas into the major points that, Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles. With the major points and devices used by Emerson defined, it is now possible to examine in greater detail how he persuades the reader, starting with the use of tone.The use of word choice, sentence length and structure, as well as many other factors found the tone of this paper. The final result is a paper that has a conciliatory tone. A paper written in this authoritative style is helpful in persuasion. It pulls the reader into the authors ideas, making them your own. The tone of the paper thus allows for metaphors to be extremely powerful in promoting Emersons ideas.The metaphors are numerous throughout the paper, however at that place is one indelible one towards the end of the paper that really helps to shape the essay. Society is a wave. The wave move onward, but the water of which it is composed does not. The build metaphor of society to the wave and the particles of water to the people distinctively demonstrates Emersons idea the society never advances. If a man is not self-confident and is inefficient to share himself with others, as people die so too does their experience. But the ability to be self-reliant eliminates this loss of experience. Although this metaphor is strong enough on its own to provide all of the support necessary for the idea that society never advances, Emerson adds to it and his other ideas with examples.The first examples are used to support the lack of patterned advance of society. The civilized man of the Americas and Europe is compared to the savages of New Zealand.