Ron Suskind Essay

Another language device Ron Suskind uses is personification. This is when he says ‘failure is persuasive or somewhat seductive’. This personification outlines that Cedric isn’t the only person at Ballou High that goes through struggles in terms of education. The words ‘persuasive’ and ‘seductive’ personifies failure and gives it human personality traits. This means that students at Ballou High want to succeed in the school, but this thing failure follows them around and continuously overpowers them into wanting to fail, instead of succeeding in school. Also, Ron Suskind using the word seductive adds a bit of excitement to failure. As if it’s a thing in which students at Ballou High want to do, or even have no choice but to fail, because failure always tries to make the kids at Ballou High give in to trying to succeed, and leads them to the life of violence and failing in school. Compared to the previous quote both of them are quite similar. They both concentrate on the negative sides of Cedric’s education at Ballou High, but in ways they are also completely different. This is as the previous quote focuses on the personal battle that Cedric has to go through at Ballou High, and how no one is there to help or support him. Whereas this quote talks about the struggles all students at Ballou High go through as a collective group, and how although they are all different they all suffer the same problems.

Another thing Ron Suskind says in his story which presents Cedric’s difficulties during education is when he says, ‘You can tell the difference between the ones who have hope and those who don’t, Cedric has it–the capacity to hope’. This means Cedric is one of the handful of kids at Ballou High who have the ability to even hope that they will have a good life after they leave school. This shows how badly influenced students at Ballou High get, to the point where they can’t even hope of having a positive life after or even while they are at Ballou High. Compared to the last quote, the quote sheds more of a positive light on Cedric’s education, saying he has the capability to make something positive of his education whereas the previous quote was focusing on how failure was a thing many students at Ballou High were going through, and found it hard to avoid.

Another metaphor Ron Suskind uses to present Cedric’s difficulties during education is when he says ‘But where I start from is so far behind from where some other kids are, * have to run twice the distance to catch up.’ This metaphor means that Cedric needs to do alot of work to catch up to the other students at MIT. And the reasons for Cedric being behind in education compared to the others as MIT, is due to the fact that at Ballou High he wasn’t able to get an education as good as those other students,  all because of the environment he was made to work in, wasn’t one in which he was able to succeed in. This quote has a major difference to the quote in the last paragraph as, the last quote singles out Cedric as a student who ‘has the capacity to hope’ for a good life after school, despite the hardships the students there go through. Whereas this quote is saying how Cedric is a student at MIT who is currently performing under-parr. There is also a differentiation of roles Cedric has at Ballou High in comparison to the one he had a at MIT. At Ballou High he was always singled out as the student who had the capability to do well, and was usually a name which would come up when the topic of the conversation was success, in comparison at MIT he was a student who wasn’t able to keep up with the standard of work which was expected of him.

In conclusion, Ron Suskind uses an array of language devices to help the readers understand the difficulties Cedric goes through at MIT and Ballou High. A quote I feel is the most effective in doing this is ‘But where I start from is so far behind from where some other kids are, * have to run twice the distance to catch up.’ I think this because it really concentrates on how Cedric’s past experience in education will forever affect him no matter where he goes due to the poor standards of education of Ballou High.