Billy Lynch
Ms. Pound
English II PreAP/Block 7
14 May 2018
Rhetorical Analysis;“Elie Wiesel’s Acceptance Speech for the Nobel Peace Prize” Author and human rights activist Elie Wiesel, in his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, discusses the nature of human injustice and its impact on his life and humanity as a whole. He adopts a forthright and heartfelt tone throughout his speech in order to gain support from his audience. Wiesel's purpose is to convince the audience to unite against injustice and human rights violations. In the beginning of the speech, Wiesel’s intention is to remind the audience of the scale and inhumanity of the Jewish genocide and to establish his own personal experiences with it. When presented with the Nobel Peace Prize, Wiesel asks a hypophora “do I have the right to accept this great honor on their behalf? I do not”. He includes this in order to establish a sense of humility with his audience so the case he presents is much more convincing to them. This …show more content…
He uses the symbolic “kingdom of night”, from which he emerged in his youth, in order to establish that he has experienced the darkness, loss, and despair of injustice first hand and knows what it is like to feel forgotten by the world. This symbol causes the audience to see why Wiesel is such a large proponent of ending injustice and why they must unite to ensure that the crimes of the past are never repeated. In the final sentence of his speech, Wiesel makes an appeal to the Nobel Prize committee’s emotions by saying “Thank you, people of Norway, for declaring on this singular occasion that our survival has meaning for mankind”. He finishes his speech this way to convince the audience that their actions can and already have had a real effect on the world and will go a long way towards bettering the lives of people dealing with