Rhetoric Study

Pages 45-46:
    "Who knows what I want to do? Who knows what anyone wants to do? How can you be sure about something like that? Isn't it all a question of brain chemistry, signals going back and forth, electrical energy in the cortex? How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain? Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don't want to go to Montana. How do I know I really want to go and it isn't just some neurons firing or something? Maybe it's just an accidental flash in the medulla and suddenly there I am in Montana and I find out I really didn't want to go there in the first place. I can't control what happens in my brain, so how can I be sure what I want to do ten seconds from now, much less Montana next summer? It's all this activity in the brain and you don't know what's you as a person and what's some neuron that just happens to fire or just happens to misfire. Isn't that why Tommy Roy killed those people?
    In the morning I walked to the bank. I went to the automated teller machine to check my balance. I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request. The figure on the screen roughly corresponded to my independent estimate, feebly arrived at after long searches through documents, tormented arithmetic. Waves of relief and gratitude flowed over me. The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hard-ware, the mainframe sitting in a locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction. I sensed that something or deep personal value, but not money, not that at all, had been authenticated and confirmed. A deranged person was escorted from the bank by two armed guards. The system was invisible, which made it all the more impressive, all the more disquieting to deal with. But we were in accord, at least for now. The networks, the circuits, the streams, the harmonies."

    The main focus of the rhetoric used in this passage is to show how society, the characters in the novel, and interactions are becoming depersonalized and highly mechanized. The diction is slightly pretentious, as it is throughout most of the novel. The first paragraph uses devices to show how people themselves are becoming mechanized. Scientific terminology is used, such as: "cortex," "neurons," and "medulla" (though it's not too convoluted and still understandable) to show how such a personal thing like thinking and making decisions is not being thought of as highly impersonal, and that the human brain functions just like a machine.
    The second paragraph shows how interactions are depersonalized and the people in this society prefer that. It's interesting how the only instance of using personal diction (such as "relief and gratitude" and "support and approval") occurs when the narrator is talking about his interaction with a machine. He even describes the interaction as "pleasing," which is very telling of how people in this society view other people. They prefer interacting with machines that are "sitting in a locked room in some distant city." The author uses asyndeton ("I inserted my card, entered my secret code, tapped out my request") in order to emphasize how automated the process is.  It's also interesting how the author has included the little detail of the "deranged person" who was being "escorted from the bank by two armed guards." The juxtaposition of this sentence with Jack Gladney's interaction with the machine system at the bank also conveys the idea that people in this society much prefer the efficiency of interactions with machines, no matter how depersonalized these interactions are.