Insert Flap “A” and Throw Away – S.J. Perelman

S.J. Perelman’s essay, Insert Flap “A” and Throw Away is full of humor, as the title entails. His entire purpose is to entertain readers who struggle with following directions and feel the need to improvise as they go on, just like he does. He amuses the readers by describing a particular Christmas morning in which he had to assemble a cardboard toy. It sounds easy, but chaos ensues when Perelman begins to put the pieces together. Perelman attended Brown University and moved on to write many popular collections that were famously humorous. He was awarded an Oscar in 1956 because of that same humor for his screenplay of Around the World in Eighty Days.

Perelman used several rhetorical devices to amuse his audience, one of which was humor. This doesn’t seem surprising and is expected, as it is what he is most well-known for. After his ordeal in failing to assemble the toy truck correctly, he describes himself being “on [his] hands and knees, bunting the infernal thing along with [his] nose and whinnying, ‘Roll, confound you, roll!’” (Perelman 189). Perelman gives the reader a visual of a grown man on his hands and knees, using his face to push a poorly constructed toy truck along the floor. Not only do kids get a laugh out of this silly moment, but adults, too, can enjoy this story of a silly parent trying to amuse their children. Perelman indeed accomplished his purpose in entertaining his readers because of the rhetorical devices he used, another being satire. He describes a different scene in which he is assembling a closet called the “Jiffy-Cloz” and has yet more embarrassing troubles with the process. When he finds trouble in assembling the contraption, Perelman finds later that “the Jiffy-Cloz people cunningly omit four of the staples necessary to finish the job” (Perelman 186). Now he is blaming manufacturers of their failure to provide all the correct materials in order to make up for the inconveniences he faced. Perelman gives his audience a laugh from his satire, evidently entertaining them.

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The Lives of a Cell – Lewis Thomas

In Lewis Thomas’s essay, The Lives of a Cell, he describes a cell, pointing out the different organelles and their purposes, as well as the history of how they came to be in the eukaryotic cell. He presents the endosymbiosis theory and explains how the eukaryotic cell was formed with those migrant prokaryocytes. However, Thomas takes this idea of a cell and compares it to the earth. Lewis Thomas had this essay published in 1971 in The New England Journal of Medicine, and during that time, the cell was still being defined. His view of comparing our world to a cell—something so massive on a macroscopic scale to something so small on a microscopic scale—was a very big leap. However, Thomas was fully aware of the step he took. Educated at Princeton and Harvard Medical School, he rose to become a professor of pathology at both New York University and Yale University. There is no doubt that he intended on comparing Earth to a cell. 

His entire essay is essentially one extended metaphor. Thomas means to simplify our works on Earth to the minute works within a tiny cell and its surroundings. Our grand advancements in technology are like the viruses spreading DNA from cell to cell; information known by our ancestors has been passed down, generation through generation, just like how DNA is received from parent cells. Thomas shows mankind that the world that we live in is just like the cells within our own bodies. He wrote to inform us that no matter what we do to separate ourselves from nature, “Man is embedded in nature” (Thomas 358). Thomas accomplished this purpose as he had provided the reader with facts about the cell and how everything is connected within the cell just as we are connected with nature on Earth.

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How it Feels to Be Colored Me – Zora Neale Hurston

This essay by Zora Neale Hurston addressed her view on discrimination against colored people. Despite being born into an era in which colored people struggled to be distinguished, Zora Neale Hurston succeeded in writing noteworthy books. Her views on racism are credible because she had experienced it herself. However, she put aside the discrimination that was set against her and did not separate the fact that she was an American citizen and colored at the same time. Hurston had that idea in mind when writing this essay. She wanted the world to know that she was not held down by discrimination, but was instead highlighted by it. It allowed her to stand out and be proud of herself. 

An important rhetorical device that was used by Hurston is found at the end of the essay. She makes an analogy between herself and a brown bag, and also connecting everyone else to other bags of different colors. She pours out the contents in her bag, revealing a mix of things, both valuable and worthless. These contents represent the things that make up a person, which is the bag. When the contents of every bag is poured into a single pile and refilled back into the bags, there is no doubt going to be some random things spread out here and there over the bags. Though the contents of each bag is not greatly altered, they all contain something new. Hurston states that, “A bit of colored glass more or less would not matter” (Hurston 117). This complex analogy helps her to reveal the inner feelings of being discriminated against as a colored person by signifying that there can be no harm in having colored people around. I believe Hurston accomplished her purpose in denouncing discrimination because of her pride of being colored. She accepted her nature while placing no blame on those who discriminated against her.

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