Wednesday, October 13, 2010

What is an example of parallelism from Mark Antony's speech?

Parallelism is a common rhetorical device used for emphasis.  As part of a parallel structure, the orator repeats key phrases.  In his "I Have a Dream" speech, for example, Martin Luther King, Jr. starts numerous sentences with "I Have a Dream."  This helps to drive home the central point of the speech.


In Mark Antony's speech, he repeats the line, "And Brutus is an honorable man."  While that sounds innocent enough, the repetition of "Brutus" and "honorable" gets the audience to question whether Brutus is, indeed, honorable, in light of the fact that Brutus just killed his best friend (and the emperor), Julius Caesar.  In between stating, "And Brutus is an honorable man," Mark Antony is actually going about making a case AGAINST Brutus.  Thus, each time that line is repeated, the audience is revisiting the idea of Brutus' honor.  Each time, they are increasingly coming to the conclusion that Brutus is not honorable at all in how he handled Caesar's assassination.

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