Free Literature Review About Persuasion Nature Of Hashish In Marseille

In the essay “Hashish in Marseille”, the author shows his responsibilities in bringing social change, which is used to compare his hashish writing as a form of radical engagement. The central argument of the essay is the use of drugs in the modern society. The essay focuses on drug literature, which is a revolutionary approach that is used to bring social change to the society. The author’s narration of his experience with drugs is aimed at showing the effects of drug abuse. “With the absolute certainty, in this city of hundreds of thousands where no one knows me, of not being disturbed, I lie on the bed. And yet I am disturbed, by a little child crying. I think three-quarters of an hour have already passed. But it is only twenty minutes.” (370)The author uses hallucinations to show the reader how hashish made him become a shadow of his former self. The intended message in this argument is how drugs affect the normal thinking and behavior of a human being.
Some of the key points in the essay are how the author was not able to pass the party line and how Benjamin’s temperament and relentlessly imaginative oddness made him fail to see the clear lines of material culture that was manifested in his life. The author points out on how he started using hashish after failing to understand the city, which is a key point that shows what many people in the current world do when caught up in a hard situation. The key points in this essay work together to create a central argument. The key points in the essay show how hard it was for the author to pass the party line, which made him use hashish. However, instead of helping him, the drug makes him get hallucinations. This conveys the central argument of the essay, which is the effect of drug usage to the normal functioning of the body.
The persuasion techniques used in this essay are ethos. Ethos in this essay is used to convince the reader by the character of the author. People tend to believe people whom they can relate to. The author of the essay has narrated his story to the reader. Thus, readers can relate to the experiences of the author and get the intended message of the essay. The author focuses to impress the reader as someone who can be listened to, which he does by giving his experience with drugs. The author commands his authority from the beginning of the essay to the end, which gives the reader the intention of the writer’s work. The writer describes himself as a person who has taken a drug experiment, but can still find his way without compromising his security and physical safety. “It (hashish) turned me into a physiognomist, at any rate an observer of physiognomies, and I observed something quite unique in my experience: I became dead set on the faces around me, some of them of a remarkable rawness and ugliness.”(374). The reader can follow the author’s predicament under drugs, which caused him hallucinations. Thus, it is easy for the reader to relate the effects of drug use as explained by the author, which makes the story persuasive enough.
The device used by the author to persuade in this essay is anecdote. Anecdote is defined as a short, interesting and amusing story about a person or real incident. In “Hashish in Marseilles”, the author narrates his experience with drugs, where he reveals his bourgeois and urban nature. The author shows how drug pushed him to do things that he could not have done if he was on his comfort zone. The most interesting part in the story is how Benjamin finds it funny to account how he struggled to find the best restaurant to have supper in. “I named some local dish. He came back and said none was left. I then pointed to a place in the menu in the vicinity of this dish, and was on point of ordering each item, one after another, but the name of the one above caught my attention.” (372)The writer uses anecdote as a persuasion device to show his readers see how drugs can make someone suffer from hallucinations, and thus affect his or her ability to make sound decisions. Though humorous, the funny experiences persuade people against using drugs to achieve what they couldn’t when sober. The author explains how drugs pushed him to do what he couldn’t have done on his comfort zone. In his narration, the author also claims how he confused a band with car horns. This point shows the danger he was in since he could easily confuse danger with pleasure. The anecdote plays a great role in conveying the intended message.
In this essay, the author uses figurative language, which shows Benjamin’s philosophical interests and hilarious verbalizations of the author’s aphoristic humor, which was influenced by hashish. Some of the keywords used in the essay are hallucination and hashish, which enables the reader find great observations in the essay. These observations are heightened by visual and auditory sensitivity, which are induced by hashish.
In this essay, the author uses a metaphorical tone. The essay can be highly appreciated due to the author’s free-wheeling and precise metaphorical flourishes. Although the writing of the author conveys a message, the reader can also appreciate it on a literary level. The essay can be enjoyed on the humorous basis that the author uses intentionally. “My walking stick started giving me a special pleasure. One becomes so tender, fears that a shadow falling on the paper might hurt it. The nausea disappears. One can easily read the notices written on the urinals”.(371) The writer uses this line to show how intoxicated he was by the drug. Although the writing of the author touches on politics, it does so through a metaphorical and figurative language. The author structures the essay the way it is to show the merits of the latter lie. The arrangement of the text shows the poetic evidence of a non-existing experience, which can be said to be prerogative of a few. The passages used in half of the essay seem quite immaterial compared to the philosophical gems that scattered in the essay.