Blog Topic #1: Rhetorical Strategies
“The first time it tasted like cat toes and rotted barley” (4).
“Then I swallowed and my whole mouth and throat filled with the echo of a rich chicken stock” (65).
“It was like autumn distilled in a spoon” (66).
“It looked like a lump of coal, completely covered in black mold” (100).
“We went down a few steps and found antipasti winking and glistening on a table in the front, as beautiful as jewelry” (193).
“…and the olive oil was singing with flavor. It was hard to image that four simple ingredients could marry so perfectly” (197).
“It was like eating fragrant clouds” (278).
Reichl does not use a lot of figurative language throughout the course of her autobiography. This seems appropriate for this genre and the time period in which she is telling her story. If she were to include more rhetorical strategies, I believe it would have seemed a little forced and unnecessary.
Reichl mostly restricts her figurative language to similes and personification. These are most elegantly displayed through her passion for food. Whenever the author is describing either the food she is experiencing or the food she is preparing, she seems to rely on these strategies to reiterate to the reader the extraordinary tastes she is experiencing. This is an effective way to add to her very descriptive imagery and appeal to the reader’s sense of taste. By saving these strategies for mainly her description of food, it expresses her love for it and also highlights the theme of the book.
Being a food critic, her descriptions of food naturally made me feel as though I was eating with her. The descriptions of food she used were so detailed that they made me understand exactly how she felt about every food she tasted. I also drew the same conclusion that by delegating her rhetorical strategies to her descriptions of food, it accentuates how she holds cooking in such a high regard. By paying attention to where the majority of her figurative language is, one can determine what brings her joy in life.
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