Personal Analysis of "A Season in Hell"

My Personal Analysis of “A Season in Hell”

In the story “A Season in Hell”, the journalist Christopher Ketcham depicts the aftermath of the September 11 terrorist attacks and shows the effects it had on the people of New York City, especially on him and many of the firemen who went looking for the remains of bodies and survivors, hours after the collision of the twin towers of World Trade Center. Ketcham uses rhetorical appeals such as ethos and pathos, and relies on literary devices such as imagery and metaphors, to help convey the overall theme of distortion of the story.

The minute a person starts reading this story they can immediately feel disturbed by the diction Ketcham uses to describe the events he saw and went through. At the beginning of the story, when he says, “He was a curly-haired guy with a paunch and puffed red lips, and he was sleeping on with his stomach with his arms over his head, lying very naturally, except he had no buttocks or legs” (Ketcham 8) he uses euphemism, instead of just saying that the guy is dead missing the lower part of his body. He also appeals to ethos, as he says “I was the only reporter there when they dug him up at 1:15 A.M. Wednesday morning, fifteen hours after the towers fell” (Ketcham 8), showing credibility to the reader.

Ketcham’s story is full of vivid imagery in order for the reader to have a clear image of how the events occurred. “There was ash and asbestos in the air, and gray drifts of millions of sheaves of paper, and mud in paddies where the tangled hoses had burst or the water had streamed from the ruins” (Ketcham 8), by seeing words such as “ash”, “asbestos”, “gray”, and “mud”, the reader can tell it was a dusty atmosphere, full of smoke due to the rubble and burning fires caused by the attacks. Another example of imagery is “…ash on every shoulder and every head, whole ash men; men with bloody eyes bandaged; wet towels over mouth; much thirst, and already the asbestos-filled air making...