Douglas Macarthur's Duty, Honor, Country

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Douglas MacArthur, a highly respected American general, altered the lives of many cadets of the corps, generals, and families on May 12, 1962 in West Point, New York. It was in this location that MacArthur delivered his acceptance speech for the Thayer Award; this award is only bestowed upon an outstanding citizen whose service and accomplishments, in the national interest, exemplify personal devotion to the ideals expressed in the West Point motto: Duty, Honor, Country. MacArthur’s aspiration in this moving speech was to define “honorable” by stating personal experiences, evidence, and characteristics that soldiers should mold their lives to. In the first reading of “Duty, Honor, Country” it is noticeable how MacArthur employs the main invention …show more content…
Using these important literary devices that enhance speeches and papers, MacArthur created a speech that noticeably emphasized the essential points and also used varying sentence length to keep the audience alert and thirsting to hear more. The first piece of evidence to this statement is the repetition of “every” in the following sentence: “Every pedant, every demagogue, every cynic, every hypocrite, every troublemaker…”. Through doing this MacArthur emphasizes that the majority of all people will try and downgrade, mock, and ridicule the soldiers. Another way MacArthur maximizes his speech is by repeating “they”; used as an anaphora, it begins the thought for four completely separate sentences in paragraph six of “Duty, Honor, Country”. The effect of this action is the gradual building of emotion and the stress, to identify importance, on the word “they”. Along with this, MacArthur integrates another anaphora into his speech. “He belongs,” is repeated in three consecutive sentences to describe the American soldier in paragraph nine. The application of this factor, once again, accentuates the main point that MacArthur is trying to get across; this point being that soldiers belong to different animations, or activities, of
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