I Caught You Voltaire

In The Old Woman’s Story I got confused when I read it. The first time, I felt weird because she tells her story with no detail and everything seems like a run-on sentence, it is a problem after a problem. However, somehow, without her talking about the dreadful emotions she felt in the moment, I felt a lot of pity for her and it was a strategy. Therefore, I decided to spy for something Voltaire used to be able to pull off a feeling of pity for her without taking loads of moments describing her sorrows.
Voltaire used a technique that is usually one used for persuading. The French author used contrast in his story, to highlight the bad. Therefore, he started using a word or a phrase that brought up the enthusiasm of the reader. Then in the same sentence, he told something tragic that brought that enthusiasm down in a very harsh way, leaving the reader with a sense of frustration and understanding the lady’s sorrows.
One of the cases were this is found was in page 51, when Voltaire wrote, “ It is wonderful how quickly these gentlemen can strip people; but what surprised me more was that they put their fingers into a place where we woman normally admit nothing but a syringe-tube.” First of all, notice the tone that the lady talks. She is not aggravated and in any moment does she describe the pain she went through, but yet you get the idea of pain. Notice how the sentence starts: “It is wonderful” raising all the hopes to the reader, but then there is a hard fall when he contrasts it with “how quickly these gentlemen can strip people.” After the semicolon we can see the same technique contrasting “surprise” with the harm that the pirates do to her.

As I mentioned before, I had seen this contrast used when persuading. I remember last year, when we learned that to persuade someone we must start by proposing something we know that the other person will reject immediately without a second thought. Later, we propose what we really want though we know that the other person doesn’t agree much. In that moment the person we are trying to persuade will compare the first awful proposal with what we really want, and will think that by giving in to the second proposal he will only scarify something little.
In the case of Voltaire’s technique, instead of drowning himself in tragic words, he made a drastic change in our emotions, to persuade us that what happened to the old lady was dramatic.