Approaching the Audience

I believe that the most effective way to communicate with an audience with the eulogy I am going to write is to start of vaguely. I will not reveal the name of the person whose life I am reminiscing. I will also attempt to to not let the age of the person I am mourning be discerned through the context of my words such as saying “he must have spent more time in the office, trying to climb the corporate ladder, than with his kids.” This implies that the person is old enough to have kids, which is usually at twenty one and it also implies that the person is working at the company for several years, so his minimum age would be around his mid twenties. Furthermore, I believe that the eulogy should end with the revelation that the person I am mourning is the reader himself. This will cause the audience to reread the eulogy with more precision to see where they failed to pick up the obvious implications that this is purposely vague, and make them reflect on their life and actions if they were placed in such a scenario and how their friends would remember them. Due to my inability to properly integrate gender neutral pronouns, I believe my audience would be limited to only men, as women would not react the same way as a man would when reading the twist at the end of the eulogy.

For my poetry I was initially considering using a villanelle in which a deeply disturbing repetitive first line becomes more and more comforting to the audience. I thought the nineteen line structure would give me more than enough space to flesh out my story. However I discarded the idea, as it is very typical of contemporary villanelles to do this and most of the audience, which are poets, would see through this and not have the shock value as expected. I have decided to instead use a Shakespearean sonnet conveying the Sisyphean struggle that a person has to go through in battling his nearly vegetative state. The person is conscious but unable to control any part of his body. He feels as though he is a prisoner to his flesh. In the climax of the sonnet I will elucidate the great triumph that our protagonist has by being able to finally control his blinking, his first step to recovery. But in the volta I will end in the somber note that all his loved ones would wish he would just pass on already since he is such a burden and an emotional wrench to both his family and friends. They slowly forget his charming, determined attitude, and remember only his permanently vegetative state where he might as well be dead. This will cause the audience to contemplate whether the struggle is worth the reward that might never be realized and make them consider their opinion on resuscitation and their opinion of them being kept on life support. I believe this is essential to the matter I am discussing of euthanasia. I will try to incorporate a faux volta in which the audience would perceive that the twist is the protagonist unable to overcome his struggle to control even his eyelids, but when he is able to do as he wishes I will reveal the true volta. I believe that my audience that consist of poets who are interested in death as a topic will be fooled by the first faux volta thus they will not expect the second true volta, which will make my writing more effective.