Turkeys In The Kitchen Analysis

Words: 580
Pages: 3

50 Essays Paper The essay, “Turkeys in the Kitchen,” by Dave Barry, is quite amusing. You can tell Barry has paid close attention to gender roles throughout his life as he portrays himself as the stereotypical American father and husband. The audience for this short satirical piece would be most average families of America, football lovers, home cooks, and working parents. The circumstances for which he wrote this piece would be the ever growing expectations and roles for men and women, and he satirizes this fact through his personal story of Thanksgiving.
To develop his central idea, he banks off the use of irony and his laidback tone. Through the use of irony, Barry is able to satirize the male gender and more specifically, himself.
Barry
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His tale of his childhood shows his insistent battle with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. In order to effectively describe what he went through as a kid, Sedaris uses understatement, dramatic irony, and a knowledgeable yet unaware tone.
Sedaris uses understatement as a way to convey the literal understatement of his condition. He does this in order to show how his tics were not taken seriously nor paid attention to. For example, Sedaris described his walk home as “short” but then went on to say it was exactly 637 steps, and it would only take him an hour “on a good day.” When he gives specific times and actions, he skims over them as if they happen to everyone. Sedaris either didn’t realize how obvious his tics were or how frequently they plagued him. He continually plays down his tics while they, in turn, affect everyone around him. These effects can be seen when his teachers visit with his mom each year. His mom knows exactly what they are talking about, however, instead of addressing the issue, she goes back and forth with the teachers highlighting each tic that has beset him for years on end, which in itself shows the magnitude of his OCD