Rhetoric Study

"Family history as a sort of immense spiderweb spanning part of two continents. If you know spiderwebs, you know that they are spun with infinite precision and patience; according to the spider's genus, they conform to a design; yet individual spiders spin variants of this design. If broken in one area, the web is constructed to hold in other areas. Nine-tenths of a cobweb might be broken yet the one-tenth would remain, holding fast, distinctive. Seigl had thought of himself as re-weaving a spiderweb, re-constructing and re-strengthening. A shimmer of fading impressions had been woven into a work of apparently durable prose, secreted by Joshua Seigl, born 1964."

In this quote, Oates is describing Josuha Seigl's book, The Shadows. As I mentioned before, this novel was about the lives of Seigl's relatives during the time of the Halocaust, they were Jewish peoples who suffered the cruel mistreatment of the Nazzis and many lost their lives. However, Seigl himself did not experience these events firsthand. Stories have been told to him by a few relatives who survived, and that is the only witnessed Seigl has to the events.

Seigl's father is often shown as frequently in Seigl's mind throughout the story so far, and it seems to be a sensitive topic for Seigl. His father was sent to live with other relatives at age 7 because of fear of the Naziis, and he lost much of his family. Ever since childhood, he was always more of a melancholy figure, and his son Joshua seemed to really notice it. Although his father died, I think that one of the main motivation's for Joshua Seigl to write his most famous book was as a tribute to his father.

In the quote posted above, Oates uses a metaphor to relate the family heritage of Karl Seigl when talking about his book. Comparing Seigl's knowledge of Halocaust experiences to the structure of a spider web allowed me as a reader to understand Seigl's knowledge of the topic and that in turn helped me learn something about him as a writer. The book was an imagined account of the tragic events, but he did have some idea of what went on, passed down from his family. Using the metaphor, Oates tells us that writing the book for Seigl was like spinning a web for a spider, it was something he could reconstruct and restrengthen.

A bit further into the novel, I noticed another good metaphor used by Oates to again tell me something about the main character, Joshua Seigl. At this point in the novel, Seigl is recalling a visit to the neurologist, and worrying about his illness; more importantly, people not finding out about his illness:

"For Seigl, desperate not to be found out, just yet, by the community, still more by his relatives, had become inordinately secretive. He'd never shared secrets readily, kept his private life private, but now he was becoming parenthetical: he felt like an eclipsed moon. He was still there, but you couldn't see him."

To describe Seigl's feelings about his situation, Oates compared him to an eclipsed moon, and explained why there is a relation. I really like Oates' comparitive style because it really helped me as a reader to get to know and understand the characters better, through logical comparisons to things less abstract and emotional.