Rhetorical Essay: Strangers
Ivy Teng
Practical Writing II
Professor Aiden Yen
1 June 2015
Toni Morrison, the one of famous writers in the world and a Nobel Prizes winner for literature and Pulitez Prize in fiction, wrote an interpersonal and narrative essay, "Strangers" It revealed the gap between people in the article by writing about an encounter with a woman on the edge of her property and later realizes that it was almost as if she was never there, Besides, she had not only pointed out the reaction of common people when they meet a strangers, but gave the positive thought and sense of strangers. Therefore, Morrison uses her experience of the conversation with the unknown woman to persuade readers that strangers might definite as a beggar or people with different language with us, but for Morrison, there are no "strangers", if we don't judge others by our first impression and prejudice.
Toni Morrison uses her own personal experiences, which consist of her language and images, to label or “throw onto” the stranger. The first encounter was a stranger fishing at the River Place in the local village, she views her as a fascinating fisherwoman who has a welcoming personality and is very easy to talk to. However, the stranger disappears for no reason that Morrison feels as if she was betrayed and hurt. Even though they only have fifteen minutes conversation, Morrison describes the stranger as something the narrator hates, yet needs in her life.
After she found out the fisher woman was gone, her form keeps showing up in Morrison’s mind. Morrison uses this example to shows us that we all have a little memory of someone who we meet only one time, especially, she/he has some trait.
Therefore, with Morrison’s experience and some strangers’ pictures, this essay express that people should not judge others and treat them as an “others”. People should not judge others by their own thought of him/her and separate them with languages. Morrison thought that people had forgotten the power of embedded images and stylish language to seduce, reveal, control. Forgot too, their capacity to help us pursue the human project which to remain human and to block the dehumanization of others. Accordingly, people could start to not be prejudiced by first impressions; maybe people could realize that there is a lot of people are nicer as everybody does.
Morrison writes the pathos of this article by her own feelings after the conversation with the fisher woman. The example she uses is her story of the woman wearing “… men’s shoes, a man’s hat, a well-worn colorless sweater over a long black dress…” By doing so, Morrison is making the essay more personal and allowing the reader to imagine a situation in which a story was assigned to a stranger.
The disappeared fisher woman arouses her curiosity and care of the stranger, which the view from her windows without the fisher woman, reminding her every morning of her disappointment and deceit. She delivers this emotion through her example and her description of this process. Hence, Morrison builds a cause and effect. She describes how the media presentations expand images and language that narrow reader’s view of what humans look like. As well, she uses of an extended metaphor of stranger shows the essential difference between perception and reality.
According to the experience of hers, she starts to ask herself questions, which are about why people want to close the distance when we can close the gate and why would we want to know a stranger when it is easier to estrange another?
To understand that she was longing for and missing some aspect of her, and that there are no strangers. For her, there are only versions of ourselves, many of which people have not embraced, most of which we wish to protect ourselves from.
In addition to the stranger is not foreign, she is random, not alien but remembered. It is the randomness of the encounter with our already known that arouses a ripple that makes us reject the figure and the emotions it provokes. Morrison uses her experience and opinion of the common view of stranger, which also shows us what makes us want to own, govern, administrate the other. To her opinion, if we can back into our own mirrors, in either instance of alarm or false reverence, we deny their personhood, the specific individuality we insist upon for ourselves.
In conclusion, Morrison uses Robert’s Bergman’s portraits of strangers provoked this meditation. According to Bergman’s portraits, we could stop to prejudice by first impressions and survey more of ourselves, instead of judging others.
In Morrison’s opinion , everyone who lives on this earth is not strangers and that there is no stranger, if we don’t look up people who has different appearance, language, nationality and so forth, then the world will be warmer and harmonious.
Work Cited
Toni Morrison. “Strangers”. The Norton Reader 13th edition. 2012. W.W. Norton
& Company, Inc.
Robert Bergman. “A kind of Rapture”. The Morning News. October 26, 2009.
http://www.themorningnews.org/gallery/a-kind-of-rapture