Rhetorical Analysis – Joyas Voladores

Rhetorical Analysis – Joyas Voladores

SW Chang

“Joyas Voladores,” flying jewels, is the essay finely crafted by Brian Doyle who is now an editor of the University of Portland’s Portland Magazine. In this short essay, the author characterizes heart, which is the organ used for blood circulation and maintenance of our life, as our complex emotion that we all have. In doing so, he sincerely and skillfully points out that we all have the common nature of emotion no matter how they are different.

At the beginning of the essay, the author Doyle states the various features to characterize Hummingbird, which helps him to illustrate one specific type of heart, the mad heart. In the first paragraph, he starts to illustrate the hummingbird’s heart by stating “hummingbird’s heart beats ten times a second” and “their hearts hammering faster than we could clearly hear if we pressed our elephantine ears to their infinitesimal chests”. By stating the numerical data and using vivid sensory languages with direct reference to a human body that creates a concrete image of incredibly fast-paced animals, his quotes not only helps to emphasize his main point of hummingbird’s heart but also help readers to get a complete understanding of the nature of hummingbird’s heart. Also, his stylistic and direct way of choosing a word in contrasting the size of heart to its speediness further magnifies his point and emotionally appeals the readers of the beauty of the flourishing life of hummingbirds which is later described as “incredible enormous immense ferocious metabolisms.”

After Doyle describes how fast hummingbird’s heart is, he starts to illustrate the pain of hummingbird’s way of spending life and makes connections to other creatures way of spending their life, too. In the second paragraph, he mentions “but when they rest they come close to death” and through the middle of the essay, he also states “the price of their ambition is a life closer to death; they suffer heart attacks and aneurysms and ruptures more than any other living creatures.” His use of both highly connotative style of word choice and inclusion of extreme diseases to show the negative effect of “mad heart” makes the author to underline his main point that fast way of using heart lead hummingbird to live shorter that creates heartbreaking tone . Furthermore, in the third paragraph, he states “Every creature on earth has approximately two billion heartbeats to spend in a lifetime” and said we can choose to spend the hearts either as tortoise who live longer or as hummingbird who live shorter. Through the generalization of some heartbeats and distinct comparison of speed to tortoise, the author further extends the variety of hearts from hummingbird’s fast heart to tortoise’s slow heart. Also, this particular connection helps readers to consider the hummingbird’s fast heart as one of our way of spending emotion which may last shorter than other ways.

The author slowly stops to illustrate about hummingbird’s heart but introduces one of the other types of heart which is the big heart of blue whale. In paragraph four, the author says “[whale’s heart] weighs more than seven tons” and “a child could walk around in it, head high, bending only to step through the valves.” As the author clarifies a whale with numerical data and imagery through the physical image of a child, he not only shows his point of view to his audience but also expands the overall meaning of the big whale’s heart to the kind and unselfish character.

Through connection to the whale’s big heart, Doyle creatively shows blue whale’s companionship with other whales that have positive effects while the pains still exist in whale’s society . In the middle of paragraph four, Doyle mentions “for next to nothing is known of the mating habits, travel patterns, diet, social life, language, social structure, diseases, spirituality, wars, stories, despairs and arts of the blue whale” and blue whales’ “moaning cries, their piercing yearning tongue.” His use of various adjectives, sensuous language style, and pathos in depicting whale’s pain provokes both emotions of the joy of social life and sorrow. Moreover, against the common preconception of the companionship in which we expect only the positive result for big heart, Doyle’s counterview  allows him to reinforce that the big heart of whale costs certain pain and risk in a more forceful way while also helping convey his broader intention behind his main argument that all type of hearts have common nature of emotion that sometimes brings pain.

Finally, Doyle asserts that humans all have their unique form of heart that has a universal nature through illustrating human’s heart and its vulnerability that leads emotion to break down eventually. In paragraph five, from the beginning of the paragraph, the author enumerates lots of animals and their structure of hearts. Through narrowing down from mammals to unicellular bacteria, he systematically breaks down the various type of hearts into one common heart in which fluid flows. Then, the author states “No living being is without interior liquid motion. We all churn inside”. By using inclusive pronoun to include the readers into his idea of human’s common feature, Doyle not only successfully makes the connection from animals’ hearts to humans’ hearts that allows the readers to have further understanding of connection but also adds to the persuasiveness of the author’s main point that all human have the same feature of emotion which comes from the heart.

Doyle makes the further concentration on nature of human’s emotion and its breakdowns. In paragraph six, he states “We open windows to [the people we love], but we live alone in the house of the heart” and then later “yet fragile and rickety always, no matter how ferocious the defense and how many bricks you bring to the wall.” By figuratively elaborating the human’s emotion in term of the house and using complex sensory languages, he magnifies his crucial point that human’s emotion is vulnerable. Furthermore, Doyle adds “you can brick up your heart as stout and tight and hard and cold and impregnable as you possibly can and down it comes in an instant” because of the powerful emotional experiences such as “the memory of your father’s voice early in the morning echoing from the kitchen where he is making pancakes for his children.” Towards the end, Doyle deliberately uses lots of visual languages to highlight the fact which our heart is vulnerable even though you make the wall harder and regardless of who you are. Also, by enumerating the situations that could break down one’s wall in emotion, the author offers readers to remind the memory of their situation where their emotion breaks down which make the situation clear. Overall, Doyle not only states positive instant such as “women’s second glance,” but he deliberately includes the further situations that cause certain pains on emotion, in which the author explicitly imply our vulnerable nature of emotion also costs pain as a hummingbird and blue whale.

In the final lines of the text, Brian Doyle leaves the audience with the idea that we all brick up the wall which not only avoids the pain but also limits us from the positive aspects of vulnerability. In his article, Doyle uses multiple rhetorical devices and appeals to narrow down the various types of hearts to the universal nature of emotion from hummingbirds and blue whales to humans. By making the connotative and robust connection through explicit and abstract ways of writing, Doyle leads the audience to recall their own experience to make a connection to various types of hearts and to eventually realizes the both positive and negative sides of our heart’s vulnerability.