Kennedy's Inaugural Address Analysis

Although 100 years apart, both Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy helped to heal a divided nation through moving and inspiring speeches that vigorously employed literary devices. Lincoln grew up in the country, with nothing more than a second-grade education to carry him through, having to make his own way in life; Kennedy grew up as the son of a rich stockbroker and politician private schools before attending Harvard and traveling the world, and yet, they both became two of the best presidents this country has seen. Through the use of rhetorical devices, such as antithesis, restatement, parallelism, similes and metaphors, in Lincoln 's “Second Inaugural Address” and John.F. Kennedy 's “Inaugural speech”, these men helped to reunite a divided …show more content…
Parallelism is where the grammatical structure of a phrase repeats itself, such as where Lincoln writes in his “Second Inaugural Address”, “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right…”, where he repeats the structure of the first phrase three times, or in Kennedy’s “Inaugural Address” where he says, “...will not be finished in the first 100 days. Nor will it be finished in the first 1000 days, nor the life of this administration, nor in our lifetime on this planet.” Repeating the grammatical structure as well as the word “nor” help to convey a more powerful message. More often than not, sentences which contain anthesis also contain parallelism. For example, in Kennedy’s “Inaugural Address” he says, “United, there is little we can’t do, divided there is little we can do.”, he repeats the grammatical structure, however, he changes the ideas in each part of the sentence. Lincoln uses a similar technique in his “Second Inaugural Address” where he states, “ ...devoted altogether to saving the union without war, insurgent agents were in the city seeking to destroy it without war…”. He uses antithesis to compare the two sides of the war, both with different hopes on the outcome of the war, however he uses parallelism to give the statement better flow. Some other examples of antithesis used in these speeches also include this example from Kennedy’s “Inaugural address”, “...Abolish all forms of human poverty and all forms of human life”, obviously two completely different ideas. Lincoln also uses it again in his “Second Inaugural Address”, contradicting himself by saying “With high hope for the future, no prediction in regard to it is