The Importance of Literature and Motivation

I believe that all written words contain a certain power that motivates individuals to an action. Whereas Philosophy and non-fiction contain facts that surprises readers, it is the poetry and non-fiction that pulls at the heartstrings of readers and instills a great sense of emotional connectedness. The most effective way to persuade a reader to sympathize and or understand your rhetorical purpose is to begin with the non-fictional cold hard facts to get their attention and follow it with a related fictional story where the emotional impact will encourage the reader to never forget and possibly act.


After reading selections from Elizabeth Costello, I learned the power of non-fiction and have gained an emotional involvement in the inhumane practices of slaughter houses. I believe that Coetzee's novel is effective because he includes non-fictional facts to get his point across. He explains that "We have become too many. There is no time to respect and honour all the animals we need to feed ourselves. We need factories of death; we need animals to feed ourselves" (97). While providing the facts that the human population has grown to the point that we rely upon factory farms to survive, the eloquent diction of these sentences has a powerful emotional influence upon the reader. By calling these factory farms "factories of death" it leads the reader to feel shameful of the way these animals are slaughtered for human benefit. Coetzee drives his point home with his famous analogy to the Holocaust by stating "it was from the Chicago stockyards that the Nazis learned how to process bodies" (97). Rather than crying over the world's misfortunes, the mix of fact and fiction encouraged me to act on this issue when I read these words.


Franz Kafka's "Report for an Academy" explains his personal viewpoint as an ape on intellectual understanding and human interaction. His report reiterates the idea that apes do not seek freedom when confined, "only a way out" (660). When confronted with a problem these animals want to simply find a way out to live day to day. However, Kafka explains that "one learns when one wants a way out. One learns ruthlessly" (662). I bring up this point to encourage people to understand that animals are extremely intelligent. Like Kafka, they think, feel, and plan. Costello claims that "the only organism over which we do not claim this power of life and death is man. Why? Because man is different. Man understands the dance as the other dancers do not. Man is an intellectual being" (99). This statement is glaringly included to shock the reader to see that there are some people in this world that believe this. As she says one page earlier, "the whole is greater than the sum of the parts" (98). All organisms in nature are equal and to be considered in the "whole" she is referring to. Like Red Peter, we are all intellectual human beings.



However, should you be a reader seeking persuasion, non-fictional works will encourage you to truly understand and have an emotional attachment. Rilke encourages the reader to understand the emotional pain a caged Panther feels by opening his poem by stating "his tired gaze-from passing endless bars-has turned into a vacant stare which nothing holds. To him there seem to be a thousand bars, and out beyond these bars exists no world" (665). Do we as humans really want to rip the nature, disposition and life out of these animals by placing them in a cage? Not only are we placing them in cages at zoos for sticky ice cream coated children to poke at, but we are sending others to factory farms to lead a miserable life before they are killed for the sole purpose of feeding the human population.


I am not suggesting that we all become vegetarians. Rather, I urge readers to consider looking at the facts and non-fictional accounts to understand the effects we have on other animals. Why could we not simply begin to act by improving the quality of life of the animals living in factory farms.