Assignment #7

Assignment 7

I didn't quite understand the The article of "LifeLike" By Orlean. At first i felt like it was just a report story due to the tone of the essay by starting out so informational. I kind of thought she was doing it because she had to, which in turn my theory was correct seeing how my teacher had told us she was actually a reporter. The essay started out with no feelings whats so ever but then the essay started to increase with feelings and emotions. I didn't quite caught that when i had read it by myself. But when my teacher had decided we would do a class review on the article, I had started to realize bits and pieces on what Orleans purpose could have been. 

Questions

1.)Why does Orlean put little to no emotion into her writing until the middle of her essay?

      This question had struck me when the class and I were in the middle of the class review. I noticed it when the class was going through the ethos, pathos, and logos. I didn't quite understand it when i read it on my own. I was in the group of pathos, which was getting a reader from not caring to caring. I never knew what Taxidermy was until i looked the word up on Google. But when i had saw the images come up I knew what it was just never knew what it was called. 

      I believe that Orlean had done that on purpose. I never really cared much about taxidermy and thought it was just hunters just going out to kill. Her essay had informed me that, there was much more to it than just killing the animals. Some of the animals died of natural death. A lot of people would just assume that they would kill the animals due to the fact that mostly deer pop up in the images and hunters kneeling next to the deer with his gun in the other hand, stating it was a good kill, then mantling them up on the wall. Due to that knowledge I don't see taxidermy the same way i use to you. Which by then changed the way i felt about it and also Orlean. 

      Like I mentioned in the question, Orlean didn't use much emotion throughout to essay, which made me to believe she was forced to do it. In the beginning it was boring because you don't want to have to read something that someone was forced to do because then it would have no emotion to it because the writer themselves wouldn't care about it. But then that thought changed when i started to notice some of her emotions coming through and feeling the passion that the people had for taxidermy. "Taxidermists seem to make little distinction between loving animals that are alive and loving ones that are not. "I love deer," one of the champions in the whitetail division said to me. "They're my babies.""(Orlean) Even though this person would most likely come of as a crazy person it shows how much love she has for animals alive or dead. The very last paragraph of the essay was the one that caught my attention the most it was basically the last sentence talking about a still born Bengal-tiger cub. "Otherwise, the room was Biblical tranquil, the lion at last lying down with the Corsican lamb, the family of jackdaws in everlasting, unrequited pursuit of a big green beetle, and the stillborn Bengal-tiger cub magically revived, its face in an eternal snarl, alive-looking although it had never lived." (orlean) The words that crushed my heart "Alive-looking although it had never lived." As a animal lover one of my favorite animals so happened to be tigers and I felt my heart break into two. It is true that when we see animals die in a movie we get all emotional but when it come to human dying in a movie we tend to laugh or have little to no emotions at all. I personally think that Orlean used that sentence to play with the readers emotions. Throughout her essay it went from little to no emotion, to somewhat emotion, and to a full out what emotional strike. 

2.)Why does she start out giving so much information about taxidermy?

     I believe Orlean explains a lot about taxidermy so it builds up her ethos throughout the essay. Ethos is basically making people see that the writer is a trustworthy person. The more information she puts about taxidermy the more people will know and see that she is actually putting effort and trying to understand taxidermy to the best of her abilities.