Rejection In Samuel Johnson's Analysis

Rejection characterizes the young American’s experience — carefully composed rejection letters from colleges threaten to fill mailboxes, job offers are extended and then denied, and romantic propositions are regularly shot down. The different scenarios leave one unsatisfied like a musical piece without a resolution, as the young scholar wishes to determine why exactly his four years of effort were incompatible with an admission to Harvard and the high school girl ponders the exact reasoning behind her crush’s denial of her “promposal.” Thus, the importance of addressing the reasoning behind rejection has only grown, as Samuel Johnson exemplifies in his refusal to obtain the archbishop of Canterbury’s patronage for an unknown mother’s son. …show more content…
He personifies the two species of hope, clarifying the dangers of indulging in an expectation “dictated not by hope, but by desire,” separating logic from want and explaining the potential consequences. In opening his description of hope with personification, Johnson acknowledges its natural existence in the human experience and the consequent difficulty in cultivating only the logical hope based on facts rather than emotion. However, he simultaneously frames his statements with antithesis, showing that although the line may initially be difficult to determine, the two hopes share few similarities and hold far more potential to harm than to help. Furthermore, Johnson employs passive voice when describing the scenarios in which hope built of desire thrives, writing of the “expectation that requires the common course of things to be changed, and the general rules of action to be broken.” The passive language acts as an example for the very process his rhetoric delineates, illustrating a scenario in which an external subject must take on a role that does not naturally belong to it. However, Johnson shifts his prose in a more positive direction at the end of his letter, stating that though he will not endorse her son, he nonetheless “may still be wise, useful, and happy.” The tricolon clarifies the rational …show more content…
Though the rejection letter doubtlessly carries a heaviness nonetheless, it at least saves her from having to wonder why, unlike today’s college rejection letters and “Promposal” refusals. Perhaps, however, this is for the better, as a fifty page response on why the scholar’s ACT score was indeed one point too low would do more to engender frustration than teach him a life