An Insatiable Emptiness Poem Analysis

One might say “An Insatiable Emptiness” is hard to read for how detailed and private does it depicts the struggle Lau suffers bulimia. Through using first person narration Lau traces her traumatizing early life experience and how has family coping twisted the conflicting psychological state within her. Lau expertly narrates the self-denying situation she is trapped in as the cause of the inescapable ritual of bulimia. It seems to this young woman that throwing up things from her stomach would eventually clear her past as well. Yet after years and years of purging and binging, the conflicts stay and they had gone worse. The purpose of this essay is to seek out how Lau uses rhetorical appeal and narration to argue that bulimia is not a way to solve psychological traumas. “An Insatiable Emptiness” will be dissected into four sections according to its content in order to examine each part in depth. The analysis will cover the main idea and the strongest rhetoric devices used in the section. Each section contributes in different degrees to the message conveyed by the author throughout the whole article. The …show more content…
Description such as “I love the feeling I had after purging, of being clean and shiny inside like a scrubbed machine, superhuman” appear frequently in this section of the essay (Lau 157). Lau ridiculously compares her bulimic-damaged self to a “superhuman” and “scrubbed machine” (157). The comparison seems to have a sarcastic undertone in it due to the incorrectness of this metaphor. The word choice in the specific sentence, “I would cram clusters of bananas into my mouth, or tubs of ice cream that lurched back up my throat in a thin and startlingly sweet projectile”, gives it an illusive cheering mood, while this content is in fact sick (Lau 158). It is authentic to think Lau has done it purposefully just to point out how absurd was it to think bulimia is