TOW #4

Sleepless in Any City by Janine Zeitlin is a nonfiction short story about the writer’s insomnia which she faces during her time studying in Madrid. She feels like she is going crazy because she cannot fall asleep due to hearing ‘thumps’ that might not actually be there. The writer, Janine Zeitlin, is an award winning journalist. A few of her articles have been published in popular news outlets including USA Today and NY Daily News to name a few. Janine’s purpose in writing this short essay is to explain to her audience how being alone in crowded areas can cause people to hear things that are not really there as a way to help them cope with the loneliness they feel. She wanted to do this in order to prove to herself and to other people in similar situations that they are not weird or crazy, rather they are feeling the side effects of our dehumanized world. In order to achieve her purpose, Zeitlin employs the rhetoric strategy of personification. For example, she writes, “I am prey to the nocturnal creaks in my mind and weak to the city creatures that stir at night. I am lonely but not alone.” (Zeitlin). In this quote, Janine uses personification to describe the city as a predator that will steal away her sleep. This appeals to the authors pathos and makes the reader empathetic to her situation and allows her to create a villain in her story. She creates a character to describe the city as a way to direct her anger at something or someone other than herself and her condition. By playing victim to a more easily imaginable source of fear and hate, Zeitlin is able to blame something other than her sanity, or lack thereof, for her condition. This makes the reader understand that perhaps she is not crazy or delusional, just mistreated by society. I found this use of rhetoric to be helpful in supporting her purpose, although it did not quite do the job. More rhetorical strategies would have been very helpful to me as the reader.