Rachel Carson’s Silver Spring, is a piece of work that is brought up in arguments

over the environment to this very day. The book itself opened the eyes of America to

the destruction that was going on right under our noses. Carson effectively uses

Anaphora, rhetorical questions, and metaphor to convey and stress her opinion that

the pesticides we are spreading are killing animals and destroying our environment.

All 3 of these rhetorical strategies imply a sense of urgency and important with what

she is saying.

Just like Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream Speech, Carson uses Anaphora to

stress and engrain in our brains the importance of what she is talking about.

Although both Carson and King were stressing different things, both had a lasting

impact on the people listening. Carson displays this use of Anaphora in two different

places in her novel, one discussing all the animals that this is affecting, “But such

rabbits or raccoons or opossums…” and one where she is enforcing constant and

constant questions to her intended audience “Who has made the decision that sets

in motion these….who has the right to decide- for the countless legions of people”.

Both of these situations have lasting effects. Carson could have just named one

animal this was effecting, but instead, she names one right after the other. This gives

the readers a sense of urgency that this situation is getting out of hand and that

something must be done to change it. In the second instance, the constant and

constant questioning can easily relate to questioning you’d face during an

interrogation or investigation. These questions, and their constant repetition, get

ingrained in your brain and cause you to really think about the issue you at hand.

Both of these examples enhance and stress Carson’s view on the protection of our

environment and the importance of how we treat it.