TOW #4 - "How to Be Alone" - IRB

The book I chose as my IRB for the first marking period is called How to be Alone, by Jonathan Franzen, who is an American novelist and essayist. He has won a National Book Award and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. The book is a collection of essays from a variety of different magazines and other publications the author has written for. The essays and the connection between them is interesting, because on first glance the essays might not seem very correlated at all, exploring various topics such as Alzheimer's disease, the American ideal of privacy, and serious fiction. However, I do believe they have something in common. They explore different aspects of being alone, and what it truly means to be alone. In the first essay, we can see as the author's father became more "alone" as he lost his memories and regressed as was mentioned many times as if he was becoming a child again. The next essay explores the topic of privacy, which is important to many Americans, and questioning the very definition of privacy itself. Privacy is often associated with being alone, and the author argues that we are more private now than ever, contrary to the popular belief that we are losing our privacy. Throughout the essay, the author establishes ethos in a few different places, primarily in the Harper's essay, where he frequently mentions how he enjoys serious fictions and talks about the novels he's written. He also attempts to appeal to logos in all of the essays in order to support whatever point he is making in that essay. I did, however, disagree with him on a few points where a claim he made was a bit unjustified, such as when he said that the "one genuine tragedy" to befall the United States was slavery, which I don't believe to be entirely true, seeing as there have been many struggles in our country's past, and to say there was only one main flaw is quite insensitive.