Analysis Of Elie Wiesel's Speech: The Pathos Behind Indifference

Using such harsh imagery and descriptive detail when giving Wiesel's speech elicits strong emotional responses from the audience, making the audience empathetic to Wiesel’s purpose for his

Wiesel pinpoints the indifference of humans as the real enemy, causing further suffering and lost to those already in peril. Wiesel commenced the speech with an interesting attention getter: a story about a young Jewish from a small town that was at the end of war liberated from Nazi rule by American soldiers. This young boy was in fact himself. The first-hand experience of cruelty gave him credibility in discussing the dangers of indifference; he was a victim himself.

In his speech Wiesel uses his life to demonstrate its effects and to argue against the sentiment of indifference that caused him and many others to suffer. Gratitude

Living through horrific events changed people, for Wiesel, with suffering came a platform to speak out and end

Wiesel appeals to the emotions of the audience throughout his speech in order to further persuade the audience. Wiesel asks if he has “the right to represent the multitudes who have perished” and the “right to accept the great honor on their behalf” (Wiesel 2). He says he did not and that “no one may speak for the dead, no one may interpret their mutilated dreams and visions” (2). Wiesel engages in the emotions of his audience, trying to make them feel sorrow for the hundreds of thousands of Jews that died in the Holocaust. He also says that no one person could ever

Elie Wiesel makes a speech that was very intense. Is speech was so powerful that the people just had to listen. He made two very important statements in this speech. These two statements were probably the strongest points of this speech.

Utilization of the repetition of questions allows Wiesel to make the audience ultimately feel as if they are in control of deciding what they think is morally correct. Within almost every paragraph, Wiesel asks his listeners rhetorical questions which truly have one compassionate answer. By using the questions, Wiesel manages to assist the listener in choosing his side without simply telling them what the right answer is. For example, when Wiesel asks if “the human being [has] become less indifferent and more human,” he implies that indifference in unconditionally inhumane. The question of “what will the legacy of this vanishing century be?” fills the audience with the duty of making the end of the century and the upcoming century the most

The general statement made by Elie Wiesel in his speech, The Perils of Indifference, is that indifference is sinful. More specifically, Wiesel argues that awareness needs to be brought that indifference is dangerous. He writes “Indifference is not a beginning, it is an end”. In this speech, Wiesel is suggesting that indifference is dangerous it can bring the end to many lives. In conclusion Wiesel's belief is suggesting that indifference is an end, it needs to be noticed and taken care of.

Wiesel’s use of ethos, pathos, logos, diction, and allusion certainly gives the audience information and emotions he was hoping

He also questioned if we, as humanity, have learned from the past and became less indifferent. Mr. Wiesel, brought an emotional hook to the audience by giving details regarding his suffering. At the end of the speech

When Wiesel conveys indifference in this way, he does so from the experience

Wiesel’s speech shows how he worked to keep the memory of those people alive because he knows that people will continue to be guilty, to be accomplices if they forget. Furthermore, Wiesel knows that keeping the memory of those poor, innocent will avoid the repetition of the atrocity done in the future. The stories and experiences of Wiesel allowed for people to see the true horrors of what occurs when people who keep silence become “accomplices” of those who inflict pain towards humans. To conclude, Wiesel chose to use parallelism in his speech to emphasize the fault people had for keeping silence and allowing the torture of innocent

When the young boy asks, “Who would allow such crimes to be committed? How could the world remain silent”, (paragraph 5) again the audience is prompted to emotionally respond. They have to realize that it was all of them, all of us, who remained silent and that this silence must never happen again. Wiesel demonstrates a strong use of pathos throughout his speech to encourage his audience to commit to never sitting silently by while any human beings are being treated

Wiesel’s speech, he begins to speak of legacy and how his century will be judged by its successor, harshly so, for its cold-hearted acts against humanity; incidentally, implying a sense of pathos to appeal to his audience’s sense of moral right and wrong. Continuing, he ventures into how so many could arrive at a state of existence that could be construed as worse than death itself. “The ‘Muselmanner,’ as they were called [as Wiesel explains it] . . . lie on the ground, staring vacantly into space, . . . no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst.

By listing a series of allusions, Wiesel was referencing the meaning behind the words. Wiesel’s list becomes a functional rhetorical tool because it stimulates the audience’s mind to form associations between his allusions and his topic of indifference. Without the list of allusions, Wiesel would not have had the same effect on his audience, since it created a lasting impression on the audience through the series of historical events about indifference. Wiesel had no need to elaborate on his allusions because he wanted his audience to think and remember by themselves the indifferences listed and reflect on how over time nothing has changed.