Rhetorical Analysis

The Perils of Indifference:

The Holocaust not only killed over 3 million Jews. It brutishly murdered human nature.

Eli Weisel’s speech The Perils of Indifference, given in the White House, emotionally impacts the audience as they reflect back upon this tragic event told from mouth of one its victims. The fact that Eli is speaking in the White house in front of the President and his wife and has won several Nobel prizes, gives Eli a trustful and respected character. Eli has become a remarkable source when it comes to discovering what really happened in these horrid concentration camps.  Through this speech, he focuses on an important but unnoticed effect of the Holocaust that is, indifference, and the heart-wrenching elimination of humanity. Through his use of pathos to appeal emotions, convincing metaphors and distinctive imagery, he opens the minds of many to understanding the perils of indifference.

Through Eli’s use of imagery, he wants us to imagine what it’s like to be in the camp of Auschwitz ourselves, so we can better connect to and come close to understand what it’s like to feel indifferent, unnoticed, and forgotten.  “Over there, behind the black gates of Auschwitz,” he begins, as the listeners imaginatively direct their eyes over to the dreary setting of a concentration camp, “the most tragic of all prisoners were the ‘Muselmanner’ as they were called. Wrapped in their torn blankets, they would sit or lie on their surroundings.” This use of imagery was a haunting narrative that brought the audience to the actual place themselves, instilling similar fear within their hearts, so they can have a deeper connection with what Eli and the Jews must have gone through.  Eli wants the audience to experience this event as well, not literally to suffer physically and emotionally, but to empathically relate to what the Jews felt so he can persuade us to understand that it is possible to take humanity away from a human.

Eli’s explanation of the camp also sets up a daunting metaphor for the audience. Using descriptions such as “they no longer felt pain, hunger, thirst. They feared nothing. They felt nothing”, he represented the victims of the Muselmanner camp as “strangers to their surroundings.” The victims of Muselmanner represented the living dead. From Eli’s metaphor it became clear to the audience that those involved in the Holocaust no longer had a sense of emotion, happiness or sadness; it is even fair to claim they were dead, for they obtained no humanistic characteristics beside the fact that their heart was still beating, their eyes still blinked, and their brains were cognitive to the demands of the Nazi guards’. Understanding this metaphor, Eli was able to more effectively impact his audience emotionally, and they began to question universal ideas such as the purpose of life and humanity. Eli’s metaphor made this event even more personal and more real to the audience as they put themselves into this situation, trying to understand the feeling of being alive but essentially dead in spirit, dead to society and indifferent to reality. The thought-provoking, insoluble question, is it better to be dead or better to be alive but feel nothing at all, becomes a rather unanswerable and vexing statement.  Eli convinces the audience through imagery and metaphors of the cruelty of indifference. This heartbreak transforms into a motivation to avoid any sort of worldly events that could lead to indifference itself. Eli ultimately wants us to join in the quest to conquer indifference in the world today.

Through reflection and expression of his character during the Holocaust, Eli invokes strong pathos by informing the audience of God’s role in the “darkest of times, inside the ghettoes and death camps” and how this also played into feelings of indifference. Using statements such as “some of us felt that to be abandoned by humanity then was not the ultimate,” he shocks the audience’s attention and implies that this indifference went way further than just an extinction from society, but a shut-out from God’s presence. How hurtful, how destroying that would feel to think that your God, the one who gave you your soul, your life, would completely shut you out of His presence. That attitude would leave you devoid of feeling, effectively destroying the human soul. Eli also uses specific word choice to madden and frustrate the audience as he continues to say, “that to be abandoned by God was worse than to be punished by Him. Better an unjust God than an indifferent one.” This claims that abandonment from God was truly the worst possible result, for they’d rather deal with the wrath of God than to have Him indifferent to them. Aware of the intimate relationships Jews had with God also made this thought quite disturbing, for they were now not only indifferent to those around them but they felt indifferent to the most merciful, long suffering being of all. Eli used these specific statements and words because it is a confusing and contradictory idea to us, especially those who presently hold a relationship with God. The frantic doubt that God could abandon us actually crosses our mind and this gives Eli the opportunity to really turn this imagined event into a reality.

Eli was able to effectively use pathos, metaphors and imagery to share the perils of indifference to his audience because he had experienced the extremities of the soul, both the emptiness and complete nothingness of any sort of good or bad emotion, and then regaining back intense feelings of which he now treasures and shares. In listening to this speech the audience struggles to grasp the oxymoronic idea itself - to feel what it felt like to feel nothing at all- and Eli was successful in planting this disturbed emotion so they could develop a deeper hatred towards the effects of indifference. He wants us to feel that hatred towards indifference so we can be the ones to prevent it in the future, to be an influence in rescuing those who suffer with indifference today and to cherish the value of human emotion.