The Idea of an Essay, Volume 3

Analysis & Response 97 Rhetorical Analysis Eleanor Raquet Ellen Raquet is a junior violin performance major at Cedarville University. She was born in Calgary, Canada but has lived most of her life in Dayton, Ohio. She is the third of eight children in her family. She enjoys hanging out with people, and reading. In The End of Solitude by William Deresiewicz, the author claims that in our modern culture, due to suburbanization and increasingly advanced technology, we have lost our ability to value solitude. We no longer want to be alone, or can be alone. Deresiewicz argues that this is a widespread problem, and we are losing many benefits from this view of solitude. He argues for the value of solitude by pointing to the history of views toward solitude. From longstanding tradition, Deresiewicz argues, man has looked at solitude as a way to connect spiritually with God, or self, or nature depending on the religion. This was religious solitude, a “self-correcting social mechanism” (2) that filled and guided you spiritually. According to Deresiewicz, the Reformation encouraged everyone to find God in solitude, and reading also encouraged thoughtful solitude, since reading requires interaction between the text and your soul. It was in the period of the Reformation and Romanticism that everyone sought the “divine word” (1) through solitude. According to Deresiewicz, Romanticism drove solitude to its greatest extremes culturally, such that religious solitude had been mostly “figurative” (2) now solitude was now literal through characters like Thoreau and Woodsworth who put solitude into practice. The Romantics also came up with a dialectic of sociability and solitude. They Rom argued that solitude improved one’s social life, and the interactions one had with others improved that person’s solitude, and thus both sociability and solitude were necessary in the life of a healthy individual.