Patient by Rachel Riederer

http://magnificentvista.files.wordpress.com/2009/11/light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel.jpg 

This photo relates to this particular story because Rachel Riederer went through a troubled time and there was darkness all around her. Continuing to get through her recovery, she finally sees the light of the situation and makes the best out of it by learning from it.

Patient by Rachel Riederer is about a young college girl who got ran over by a bus and takes the reader through a long journey of recovery. For author Rachel Riederer, this was a true horror story that happened to her a few years back at Havard University.  Riederer's writing also appears in Guernica, The Nation, and Capital New York. She currently teaches writing at Baruch College. The context of this essay is the bus running over Riederer. Her purpose of this essay is to convey that even if one does not believe "everything happens for a reason," one should still believe that "everything happens for the better," and that life throws twists and turns so instead better things can work out. I believe the author achieves her purpose. Throughout the story, the girl is struggling with understanding how people could believe that everything happens for a reason. Her thoughts throughout the story consist of "why me?" and who to blame for this happening to her. Towards the end, her mindset changes. She starts to believe that because of this happening, better things will fall together. "I will meet someone, do something, go somewhere--that could only happen because the texture and timing of my life were changed..." (179 Danticat). Because of this situation, her timing in life will better fall together, or so she believes. In this essay there are multiple accounts of profanity used, therefore the audience targeted is older teens. Since the story is told in first person and the main character is a 20-year old, her thoughts and feelings will be most appreciated by a reader of that age, give or take a few years. She uses humor and a sense of bitterness in a lot of her thoughts, and another peer would most understand that humor. This also is apart of the rhetorical devices used. None of her wording is extremely difficult to understand. She gets to the point of how she is feeling with humorous diction. The story is also cut into 10 different sections, which breaks the story up into different important events. This achieves the author's purpose because all the events come together to form the entire incident, which leads to her understanding that better things will happen because of it. Because of her bitter humor, this new understanding is a big deal to the main character.