Ethos, Pathos and Logos in "On Dumpster Diving"

Ethos: Lars Eighner the author of “On Dumpster Diving” has actual experience being homeless and scavenging for food. This gives him credibility as a dumpster diver.He also was been a dumpster diver long enough to be very experienced on the subject.

 Pathos: Lars Eighner tells a story about a girl whose trash he examined and he was able to tell the reader that she had a bad relationship because he found a ripped up picture of a boy and a bag of contraceptives. This use of emotion in his writing brings the reader a sense of grief. The last line of the short story goes, “I am sorry for them”. This line refers to all of the people between him and the very wealthy who are unsatisfied with their lack of ability to gain new possessions. The reader would be able to relate emotionally to this because chances are they are one of those people in the middle.

 

Logos: The author goes through a long speech on how to tell if a canned food is good or not. He also tells the reader which dumpsters are the most profitable to scavenge through. 

Televaters

The song lyrics to Televaters and the video seem very melancholy. You can tell the lyrics talk about suicide and in the music video the man actually commits suicide by jumping off the side of a building. The song lyrics say,” Just as he hit the ground” which implies that the character in the song falls to his death which is of course what happens in the video.

The video also features a glow of light around animals and their eyes. In the lyrics they mention the word aureole, which means a circle of light surrounding something, like the animals in the video.

The lyrics mention, “a curse that flew right by you”. In the video there are black birds that fly past the viewers perspective. The last few lines of the lyrics go, “Everyone knows the last toes are always the coldest to go”. The man in the video is the last man left in the city and he commits suicide. This suggests that his toes were the last to go and that he went out in a more depressing and miserable way then the rest of the people.