Yelena Maksimova

English 105 sec. 84/85

Rhetorical Analysis

There Has Been a War

“The time is out of joint.”

Shakespeare, “Hamlet,” Act I, Scene 5

In “The Son of Man,” Natalia Ginzburg asserts that while the war did irreparable psychological damage to its survivors, it also gave the young generation enough strength to confront the stark reality of the precarious nature of human existence. Passionately but concisely, through the use of repetitive imagery, fatalistic tone and lack of classic organization, Ginzburg shows how the war changed the world around Man and how Man changed his perception of the world.

People cannot choose the time to live and die. Ginzburg had to live through the horrors of war: destroyed houses, air raids, arrests, and death. She shows how the war not only deprives people of their belongings, but also distorts the primary meaning of things and concepts. The world “police” no longer bears the meaning of protection and help but rather that of fear and suspicion. All pretty things that decorate a house, as well as the house itself, come to be viewed simply as raw material that will eventually turn to dust. Children of the war had seen too much terror and suffering in real life; therefore, Ginzburg asserts that this makes it impossible to raise children telling them fairy tales as the previous generations did. The only advantage the Ginzburg’s generation got from the war is the ability to see and speak the truth. As the generation of men they have no illusion they will find some peace or certainty in life, but they have found “strength” and “toughness” to “face whatever reality may confront” them and they are “glad of their destiny”.

Ginzburg speaks on behalf of her generation appealing to everyone who is willing to listen. Her voice is full of passion and conviction. Appealing to a reader, she neither tells a particular story nor asks questions nor calls for action but rather, as a heroine of an Ancient Greek tragedy, declares her woe and fate: “There is no peace for the son of man.” Since she casts herself in this role, one of her main rhetorical strategies is fatalistic tone. More than half the sentences in the essay contain some sort of negation. With relentless obsession she repeats “never,” “no longer,” “useless,” “we cannot,” and every time it means: do not delude yourself – the wounds of the war are incurable. Adjectives and nouns: “incurable,” “darkest,” “insecurity,” underscore even more deeply the fatalistic atmosphere she creates. Most sentences are very short as if cutting off any opportunity for a reader to have another opinion. She aims to reach our hearts, not our heads. “We shall not get over this war. It is useless to try.” She repeats this thought over and over driving it relentlessly into the reader’s mind and leaving no hope for a happy ending.

At first sight, the organization of the essay may seem chaotic – deprived of the three classical parts. There is no introductory paragraph (to acquaint a reader with a situation she only says “There has been a war”), no plot development (because there is no plot), and no clear finale (nothing new can be added or finalized). Ginzburg deprives a reader of the classical organization to show that war is not a history with beginning and ending dates: people have suffered and are tied to their suffering forever. However, she does provide some organization on a paragraph level. As if leading the reader around in circles, she starts every paragraph with a short declaration that is close in meaning and tone to most of the beginning sentences of other paragraphs. The overall thought is that there is no recovery from the horrors of war. The body of each paragraph supports that thought every time by adding more details to the picture. The endings summarize the damage the war brought to people, but each new paragraph brings the reader to the beginning of the circle again. It is as if Ginzburg says: no matter how many details I add it is going to be the same circle of despair with no exit.

Another rhetorical method she uses to show a reader the impact of the war on people is repetitive imagery. Starting from the very first lines, Ginzburg introduces the reader to two major images of her essay: “a house reduced to rubble” and “a little vase of flowers.” She constantly repeats the latter gradually adding new shades of meaning to it in order to develop one of the two opposing sides: her generation and the older generation. For example, if in the first paragraph “a little vase of flowers” represents one of the things that were lost during the war, then later on it also represents things that hide the truth as well as attributes of the outward peace and finally she associates it with the older generation, which is still “too fond of falsehood.” In contrast, “a house reduced to rubble” represents only one image: the destructive power of war. However, she constantly repeats this image (five times, to be precise) to express psychological as well as physical destruction. A special part is reserved for Ginzburg’s generation: she calls it the “generation of men” as opposed to the previous generation of “foxes and wolves.” She uses this image comparison to show that the gap between two generations is insurmountable (lifestyle of men is very different from that of animals) and even though the war deprives her generation of any certainty, safety and rest it forces it “to seek out new strength.” Thus, her generation gets a higher status, the status of men, and a new world, the world of the unadorned truth.

Ginzburg insists that time cannot heal the wounds of war and that her generation, tied to war by its suffering and by its destiny, uncompromisingly carries the truth. She effectively uses all her rhetorical tools: repetitive imagery, fatalistic tone, and purposeful lack of organization, to show how war makes people lose their world forever.