TOW #2- Big Boy

This week I read an essay called Big Boy from the book Me Talk Pretty One Day by David Sedaris. It was a short story about a time Sedaris went out to dinner with his friends and went to the bathroom. When he arrived in the bathroom there was the largest #2 he had ever seen in the toilet. After trying to figure out what to do for 10 minutes he started panicking. He didn’t want to leave it because people would think he did it. It finally flushed and he walked out to his friend saying “Finally, took you long enough”. The author’s story is very credible because he experienced it first hand. Sedaris is trying to relate to his audience, which is people similar to him, adults living on their own. The story seems very pointless until the last paragraph. The author puts a lot of meaning in a few final sentences and forced me to reflect back on the whole essay. The purpose of the story was to teach a lesson that you should not care too much about what other people think about you. The main and most effective device used was definitely rhetorical questions. At the end of the essay he states, “the person who abandoned the huge turd had no problem with it, so why did I? Why the big deal? Had it been left there to teach me a lesson?” These questions have obvious answers because it can easily be inferred that the author is hinting there was a meaning by clearly stating the meaning in the first question. Just after this statement he uses wit to convey that changing isn’t quite that easy. As soon as you can infer the purpose is to stop thinking about people judging you he says, “I resolved to put it all behind me, and then I stepped outside to begin examining the suspects”. I laughed at this because he just stated to not judge people however he then says he’s going to judge everyone. I think he said this in order to show it isn’t easy to change.