Employment of ethos in The Hunter by Richard Stark Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay In The Hunter, Richard Stark's anti-heroic protagonist, Parker, is portrayed as a criminal with a grudge and a score to settle. Despite his many deplorable actions throughout the book, Stark, a pseudonym or alternate name for Donald E. Westlake, manages to portray Parker's character in a more heroic light despite the fundamentally evil qualities Parker possesses as a criminal and borderline sociopath through the language that Stark adopts in his descriptions of Parker's personal qualities and actions. This act of moral legitimation, however, requires a specific audience to which the author must appeal in order for the ethical appeal to the character to be successful in reaching the audience's moral prejudices. The personal characteristics of Parker, the protagonist, as well as other specific details and themes present in the book reveal that Stark's intended audience is most likely young, white, male, educated, and positioned on a lower income spectrum. This essay will illustrate that to convince this specific audience of Parker's credibility and positive qualities as a non-traditional anti-heroic protagonist, Stark uses rhetorical appeals extensively through ethos so that he can highlight the more heroic qualities that Parker may or may not truly possess. Stark accomplishes this feat because he portrays Parker as a figure who shares the values ​​of justice, cunning, courage, organization, realism, and masculinity with the generally white, male population he tried to appeal to in the 1960s when he wrote the novel while simultaneously reducing the roles of women and people of color to roles more like those of props than fully realized characters. Audience Age + Gender/Race/Nationality Creating rhetorical narratives holds a key role in fictional writing in how writers construct realistic stories. , human characters. Rhetorical pathos and logos, emotional and rational appeals, can be used to help an author flesh out a character, but these argumentative techniques alone cannot capture the full profile of a figure. To create relatable characters, an author must often employ a rhetorical ethic. Ethos involves employing rhetorical techniques so that a figure's character can be established while addressing an audience and to influence how the audience perceives a figure, both through illustrations of how intrinsically moral the personal character of a character could be by itself or through the juxtaposition of a character's personal traits through the contrast of these qualities with those of others. One can witness this technique of establishing a personal ethic in politicians who seek to create an “us versus them” mentality in order to demonstrate their moral superiority and demonstrate that they are the superior choices for these reasons of comparison. As for the audience that Richard Stark intended to address through his ethical appeals to Parker's character, the social cues present in the novel and the stark contrasts between how various groups of people are portrayed in the text reveal who most likely he would find himself reading. the text. There are several indications throughout the book that suggest the target audience would be young white Americans, particularly when presenting these rhetorical narratives to male readers. Not only are most of the novel's main characters male,but the novel also fails to take more than a superficial look at the psyches and motivations of the female characters. Stark's perhaps intentional exclusion of decidedly female narratives makes it fundamentally more difficult for female readers to identify with the events that take place in the novel, although this exclusion may instead have been the result of a general tendency among male writers to give priority to male narratives. If this were the case, this would suggest that male audience members would take precedence in Richard Stark's intentions to persuade his audience to view Parker's character more favorably. In addition to the exclusion of female narratives, Stark also portrays the women present in the novel as status symbols as opposed to fully realized figures. Stark illustrates this sexist sentiment that women are disposable and updatable, in contrast to his more positive portrayal of Parker, writing that “One day…he'd have four rooms like this, and a blonde like that hunk with the bra red. It was good stuff” (Stark 72). While such statements fundamentally betray the questionable character that Parker possesses, at least in the modern context, such sexist attitudes in the text would appeal to the average man's historical way of thinking. Such expressions of objectification towards women would ultimately dissuade the average woman from finding many positive qualities in Parker for the reason that the average woman experiences similar sexist comments on a daily basis. The illustrations of casual sexism in the context of The Hunter help reiterate the evidence that Richard Stark intended to write for a male audience by establishing the ethos of Parker's characters. Throughout The Hunter, women are not the only group of people that Richard Stark chooses to place in a different category in an attempt to highlight his protagonist's character as a member of the group. This sequence of juxtapositions between Parker's identifiability and the otherness of other people serves as a strong rhetorical appeal in his writings to speak to his target audience through an established ethos. Stark, in this way, singles out people of color as stock characters to show a sense of otherness to Parker's position of making himself identifiable to the intended audience of The Deer Hunter, which continues to suggest the importance of white men in the ethical structure of novel. This appeal to ethics through prejudice in Stark's target audience can be seen by a reader when Stark writes that "Three black boys walked in his direction on this side, wearing raincoats and pig hats and singing in falsetto" (Stark 181 ). The fact that Richard Stark felt the need to refer to the race of these people in this statement by referring to them as what appears to be a racial caricature seems to suggest that Stark intended to signal that these individuals represented an anomaly in the context of social society. dynamics present throughout the novel. This would ultimately mean that the main characters were, by default, white and, therefore, in the perception of the reader for whom the novel is intended, what is “normal.” Richard Stark's portrayal of these people of color in such an anomalous way, while perhaps a relic of the era in which The Hunter was written, speaks to internalized prejudices against people of color that, in general, remain prevalent in society American society, along with the continued tolerance of the previously mentioned sexist attitudes towards women. Since the novel is set in the United States, general American attitudes, especially those, could be taken into account.