Rhetorical Analysis Essay On What I Lived For

Throughout Henry David Thoreau’s “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” Thoreau uses an extended metaphor to critique society, and express his philosophy of how and why people should live. When he says, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us. Did you ever think what those sleepers are that underlie the railroad? Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them, and they are covered with sand, and the cars run smoothly over them. They are sound sleepers, I assure you. And every few years a new lot is laid down and run over.” In this, he is saying that the railroad is not essential, people move too fast, and need to slow down. He uses the parallelism of, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” To show …show more content…
When he says, “Each one is a man, an Irishman, or a Yankee man. The rails are laid on them and they are covered in sand…They are sound sleepers, I assure you.” He is speaking out about the backbreaking labor of railroad construction, and he is saying that the sleepers, which are the wooden ties on which the rails were laid, are sound. He uses this double entendre to show that not only were the tracks built nicely, but the men who labored on the railroad did not speak out about the backbreaking work they did, and they were paid very little in return for their labor. When Thoreau says, “And when they run over a man that is walking in his sleep, a supernumerary sleeper in the wrong position, and wake him up, they suddenly stop the cars and make a hue and cry about it, as if this were an exception.” With this, he is saying that when they come across a sleeper or a person who is “walking in his sleep” or in an upright position, they immediately stop the cars and make a stir about it. This implies that if the “sleepers” speak out about the backbreaking labor, they will be silenced as fast as