Introduction Provide the reader with background, context, and the reason you are writing this paper. Your first few sentences should hook the reader. Start your paper by telling a story, or presenting a relevant quote. On a cold night in the middle of January, 1902, Parisian firefighters were called to extinguish a raging inferno in front of the Duchamp Bookstore. The fire was quickly determined to have been set intentionally. The fuel? 200 copies of André Gide’s The Immoralist, a shocking new novel that Monsieur Duchamp had insisted upon selling despite receiving numerous warnings and threats. Provide some context and background information about the text being analyzed. Now would be a good time to briefly mention some of the SOAPS—speaker, occasion, audience, purpose, and subject. The Immoralist concerns the increasingly deranged exploits of Michel, a young government functionary who is tired of his dull, predictable life. Over the course of the novel, Michel marries, divorces, travels from France to Algeria, and proceeds to lose himself in a riotous swirl of selfishness and hedonism. Specify your thesis statement. Decide which aspect(s) of the text you will analyze. Michel is not entirely a fictional character—rather he serves as a manifestation of Gide’s desire to exist without paying heed to societal rules and norms. Body Organize your body paragraphs by rhetorical appeals. Remember to support your arguments with textual evidence. Ethos: analyze the ways in which the author uses his status as an expert to enhance credibility. Michel’s travels and emotional transformation closely mirror the author’s experiences. André Gide was born to a middle class family in 1869 and traveled to Morocco as a young man. Similarly to his protagonist, he had a short, unhappy marriage and never had any children. Logos: identify one major claim and evaluate the text’s use of evidence to support this claim. Michel speaks to us through a constrained first-person voice. His decisions and opinions become our own, simply because we are afforded no other input. The audience therefore is unable to refute Gide’s doctrine of hedonism, because it perfectly describes and encapsulates his carefully constructed worldview: “The frightening rigidity of village life had transformed Charles, once a carefree and joyous boy, into a shambling simulacrum of good taste and propriety” (Gide 116). Pathos—analyze any details that alter the way that the viewer or reader may feel about the subject. The Immoralist appeals mainly to pathos in its rich, often disturbing depictions of emotional turmoil and excess. In one passage, Marcel describes the Algerian hills after a rainstorm: “This land...was now awakening from its winter sleep, drunken with water, bursting with the fresh rise of sap” (Gide 55). Here, Gide has anthropomorphized the landscape and imbued it with the human qualities of intoxication and carelessness. Conclusion Remind the audience of your purpose in writing your essay. Restate your thesis and the main ideas found within your rhetorical analysis. By choosing to express his ideas through the voice of a fictional character, Gide places some distance between himself and his radical philosophy. However, even the vehicule of fiction did not prevent the novel from becoming one of the more infamous publications during the Belle Epoque. Gide’s call for us to abandon rules in favor of self-determination was a dangerous belief in this highly regulated society.