Everything Burns Anthony Nowicke Analysis

In Everything Burns: the psychology and philosophy of the Joker, author Anthony Nowicke makes an unsuccessful attempt to convince the audience that the Joker’s appeal is due to human’s instinctive desire to rebel. Nowicke uses a majority of lower level vocabulary and only circles around his main point of existentialism. By failing to establish ethos, spending more time explaining existentialism rather than providing extrinsic proofs, and losing focus Nowicke fails to rhetorically persuading his audience. In the article Nowicke jumps straight to the point, normally this would be of great relief, however, at no time does he mention any of his sources or if he did any research. By expecting the audience to trust him, his lack of ethos in his article leaves doubt in the mind of his reader making them ask “okay, why should we trust you?”. The author also does not use any jargon that is in association with making his point he only uses lower level diction with the exception of one or two …show more content…
It is clear to see that Nowicke very easily gets sidetracked being that he spent half of his article explaining every detail of Hobbes’s life, Christopher Nolan’s work, and what existentialism is. This makes the article seem like it is being written without a clear view of what the end goal is. Nowicke does, however, allude to the movie in very clever ways like reminding the reader that the Joker is, “ ... a guy of simple taste, enjoying dynamite, gunpowder, and gasoline”, regrettably this only happens after all the excess information is presented. The lack of focus in the article is so evident that the explanations could be an article on their own. Losing focus really makes the author circle around his point but never really lets him make it and in the end makes his claim