9.11.01: The Skyscraper and the Airplane is an essay by Adam Goodheart in which he mainly discusses the nature of skyscrapers and airplanes. In the essay, Goodheart discusses the factors that play into the modernity of these technological advances. Goodheart’s essay primarily serves to point out that, while we are become more modern, our society is also becoming more at risk due to the fragility of the technology. Goodheart uses irony throughout his essay to demonstrate this. For example, Goodheart opens paragraph twenty by saying that “The architect of the World Trade Center, Minoru Yamasak, was afraid of heights.” He goes on to point out in paragraph twenty-one that the purpose of architecture is to provide shelter, yet they are also putting us at risk. Furthermore, Goodheart explains that airplanes “fascinate us… because part of us always imagined them falling.” This points out that the only way we can truly love something is if we fear it going away. The essay is concluded by Goodheart commenting on a helicopter that was above ground zero shortly after the attack. He points out the Irony that another “miraculously suspended” flying machine is just above where the airplane had just brought about destruction. The author also uses personification of airplanes and skyscrapers in order to emphasize their fragility. The personification also serves to make the reader feel more emphatic towards the topic. In the first paragraph, Goodheart describes the collision of the glass and metal “skins” of the airplane and the Twin Towers. Goodheart uses personification again later in the paragraph by describing the collision this time as a “fatal kiss.” The word “fatal” not only emphasizes fragility, but also the idea of inevitability. Throughout paragraph nineteen, Goodheart compares the security that we are meant to feel in an airplane to the safety of a mother’s womb. By comparing airplanes to fetuses, he further emphasizes the general theme of fragility. Additionally, Goodwill frequently employs allusions in order emphasize the modernity and complexity of airplanes and skyscrapers. For example, in paragraph eight, he goes into detail about the history of the word “skyscraper,” and when it was first used to describe tall buildings. The author alludes to this in order to make us realize that we truly have technological advancements when we have to invent new words for them. Goodheart goes on to cite Antione de Saint-Exupery as predicting that “within a generation or two… The airplane would seem a perfectly common place thing.” This quote is used to show that things that are technologically advanced in one era may not be technologically advanced later on. Additionally, Goodheart credits Elisha Graves Otis for his contributions to the design and safety of the skyscraper. He then goes on to explain that “for the first time in human history, millions of ordinary people would be required to entrust their lives, on a daily basis, to technologies whose inner workings remained a mystery.” Goodwill states this in order to demonstrate that the modernity of our civilization today as reached the point where we don’t even know how it works.
Chase Lyndale 1-24-12 9.11.01: The Skyscraper and the Airplane is an essay by Adam Goodheart that deals with the modern world we have created and the fragile nature of it. He also makes us wonder why we have become so comfortable with the world that we have created as it is very unnatural, with our two main inventions skyscrapers and airplanes terrifying us. Goodheart uses four strategies to help prove his main point, those strategies being irony, metaphor, allusions, and long complex sentences. He uses each one of these strategies to amplify and reinforce Goodheart’s main point subtly turning us to what he believes. Of course, he uses other strategies but these four are the most important. Goodheart uses irony to point out the incongruities between the modern culture that we live in and the fragile nature of it. He uses irony because the main point that irony deals with is the incongruities of life. One example of irony that Goodheart uses is “the architect of the world trade center was afraid of heights.” By pointing out the fact that even those who dream of building skyscrapers are terrified of them, he shows that they are unnatural and most people feel uncomfortable in them. Another of Goodheart’s metaphors is “The irony of architecture… we set ourselves at risk.” He is saying that even though we create the skyscrapers and buildings we are terrified of what we create because it has created the possibility for disaster on a grand scale. One more example of irony is “Each a rig that suspends us far above the ground, half-willing aerialists, and then whispers: trust me.” In this sentence, Goodheart points out the incongruity that even though flight is essential we are all still afraid of planes on a subconscious level. Goodheart uses irony because it is perfect to make us subtly think about how completely unnatural this modern world is that we have created. Goodheart uses metaphors to turn us slyly against skyscrapers and planes, things we have come to revere
A metaphor that he uses is, “like a pair of middle fingers, raised against the hostile vastness of the Atlantic Ocean.” By comparing the skyscrapers to middle fingers, he makes us subtly angry because middle fingers create anger in the majority of people. This manipulates us into thinking that skyscrapers are bad helping prove his point that we have created an unnatural modern world. Another example of metaphor would be when he says, “he designed the World Trade Center with narrow windows framed by vertical columns like prison bars”. By comparing the trade center to prisons, he once again makes us subtly turn against skyscrapers and what they stand for. One last metaphor that Goodheart uses is “Two manmade behemoths joined in a fatal kiss.” This connects skyscrapers with fatality and death in our minds by using the word fatal, so we once again dislike skyscrapers. All of his metaphors make us turn against the modern world that we have created. Goodheart also uses allusions to help make his point by helping tell the story of the development of modernity. The allusions also lend him credibility that is needed in a paper like this because he is on the verge of attacking 9/11, which is a major taboo in America so his command of the facts forces us to respect his opinion. One example of allusion in the paper is, “in that same year, 1908, E.M. Foster wrote a short story envisioning a world of the future where humans lived in a huge structures composed of tiny, airless champers,… Pekin is just like Shrewsbury”. This allusion first shows off his knowledge of literature but it also makes us connect the current world we live in with the dystopian world foster created. It also goes on to describe the destruction of that world leading us to believe that will happen to ours. Another example of metaphor is “The cultural critic Marshall Berman… All that is solid melts into air.” In bringing in this allusion, he once more establishes his complete grasp of his subject and gives us something to think about in respect to what the critic says about being modern. These allusions serve to give more substance the argument. One last strategy that he uses is to lengthen his sentences with hyphens and colons. An example of him using the hyphens would be in the sentence, “… , high quality structural steel-the first truly revolution…”. An example of Goodheart using colons to lengthen his sentences would be “Try to imagine them there, suspended: two man-made behemoths joined in a fatal kiss.” By breaking the sentences up like this, he sets up a parallel with the collision of 9/11 that he describes at the end of the paper. The first half of the sentence sets up the punch line that the second half of the sentence produces in a collision with the first half. This sentence level strategy is very subtle but is also very effective.
“The Skyscraper and The Airplane” expresses a general dislike for modernity. Goodheart employs his ideas about society not being informed about the dangers that come with our technology. Of course they benefit our schedules, but they also threaten our lives. We depend too much on the technology that surrounds us, and without it, society could not function. If something goes wrong in our lives we blame it on an object rather than taking matters into our own hands to learn how to fix our own problems. Goodheart uses irony to express how our society is fragile and to express that our technology is dangerous. He compares a skyscraper to an airplane “joined in a fatal kiss” to exemplify how our technologies put us at risk. This quote gives us a sense of reality for flying and being in a skyscraper, and makes us think twice about whether to trust our beloved technology. For instance he says “we create structures to shelter ourselves, yet in building them, we set ourselves at risk” to show that we never think about what could happen to us if they did end up failing. People never think about who will be navigating the airplane that they are flying on, or the architect who built the skyscraper they are standing in. It is a scary thought, but it is something we need to be aware of before we put our lives in the hands of our technology. The author also uses irony to employ that our society is fragile. For instance he tells us how “the architect of the world Trade Center, Minoru Yamashi, was afraid of heights”. Goodheart brings up the architect’s fear of heights to back up his point of how our society is weak. We rely on our technology not to fail, and if it did have a malfunction no one would know how to fix it or even know where to start. Goodheart uses accumulation in his writing to depict the complexity of our modern society. In paragraph 18 on page 307, he states that “flying requires an act of almost religious faith” to describe the trust we put in the “corporations, pilots, governments, engineers” who are controlling whether we crash and die. We do not understand how flying works, so that is why we pay other people to do it for us. If something went wrong we would have no clue of what to do to save our lives and the lives of others. Technology is a good thing, but we need to take the responsibility of learning to live with failure because it is inevitable that one day our knowledge will be needed. Goodheart uses anaphora to portray that modern society’s knowledge about our amenities is not where it should be, and we need to become aware of how our technology works. He also uses anaphora to describe how precious our human life is, and that we need to know what we are doing before we put our lives in danger. In paragraph 4 he says that airplanes and skyscrapers are “fragile containers for even more fragile flesh and blood “to exemplify how important human life is. He then goes on to start several clauses in a row with the word “each” to describe the similarities of how the skyscraper and the airplane trap us in chambers far above the ground to teach us one similar thing, “how to be modern”. Learning how to be modern is more like learning how to use someone else’s product, instead of knowing how it is made or how to fix it.
Patrick Guthrie AP English January 24, 2012 Mr. Brown “The Skyscraper and the Airplane” is a short story written by Adam Goodheart that tries to give the events of 9/11 some sort of explanation. The question that is commonly brought up is whether not we are safe in the modern world we inhabit today. Goodheart tries to answer what it means to be modern and because we are modern does it make us safer or are there we just as delicate and fragile because of all the new problems technology has developed. Through different rhetorical strategies, Goodheart tries to answer this question. Goodheart employs metaphors in the form of in the form of personification of airplanes and skyscrapers to show their humanlike weakness and vulnerability. These massive steel structures were thought of as almost invincible because they were really involved in tragedy until 9/11. Goodheart refers to both planes and skyscrapers as having skin this gives them humanlike qualities. Skin is thought to be somewhat weak and vulnerable that is why in battle it is often armored in battle. The vulnerability of modern society and humans is shown here by comparing the two. In a different part of the story, planes and skyscrapers are referred to as fragile containers with even more fragile cargo. This furthermore demonstrates the fragility and vulnerability of humans and their modern way of living. Another rhetorical strategy used by the author throughout the story was irony. During the entire short story, the idea of the modern age is discussed. With this idea of modernity comes about thoughts of safety. Modern things are thought to be safe, but the events of 9/11 contradict all of these presumptions. This irony is shown in the story when Goodheart speaks of the strength of steel which made both the skyscraper and the airplane a possibility. The irony is that the strength of the steel did very little when the two collided. This shows that just because society is modern we are not safe because new problems that could be foreseen appear. Goodheart incorporates many allusions in his writing to prove some of his points and to add to some of the irony in the story. One allusion is about the engineer who built the twin towers. The ironic part is that he is afraid of heights. Another allusion used by the author is a quote from a book by Karl Marx. The quote is about the meaning to be modern. It speaks about modern the modern world as having joy, power, and growth. It also says that there is a threat that everything can be destroyed. The events of 9/11 were an example of this power and growth being destroyed.
Goodheart incorporates several rhetorical styles such as allusions, metaphors, the anaphora, and irony. He uses these strategies in order to show his views about modernity and the deterministic inevitability of these great inventions collapsing. He compares our new marvels to older marvels such as the Titanic. He personifies the skyscraper and illustrates all of its mysterious complexities. Through all this we can see that these new technologies can fall just as easily as they can rise. The allusion is first introduced in the opening epigraph by Thomas Hardy. He includes this poem in order to show that society puts its entire trust in to technology. He mentions the “smart ship” which implies the titanic and how it had met its match, the iceberg. He glorifies the new technology “in stature, grace, and hue”, but he shows us its mortality “in shadowy silent distance grew the iceberg too”, in order to be able to compare the Titanic’s apparent invincibility to the modern skyscraper and airplane, but also explain its defeat. Another piece of writing that the author includes is a quote by Karl Marx that states, “to be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world-and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.” This powerful quote helps Goodheart express his feelings towards the good about modernity but also its mortality. Goodheart integrates the metaphor in order to support his ideology that our modernity is untouchable but at the same time so vulnerable. “Like a pair of middle fingers raised against the hostile vastness of the Atlantic Ocean” is his way of saying that our American modernity is supposedly more superior to the rest of the worlds. Our skyscrapers and airplanes are our own inventions created in order to ease our way of life but also to boost our human egotistical feelings. Every day we entrust our lives into something that can’t be seen or understood. We trust the engineering behind these modern marvels. In the first paragraph Goodheart is able to incorporate the anaphora in which he repeats the word before, “before the fire, before the ash, before the bodies”. He keeps repeating before in order to show how we felt before the catastrophe ever happened and how, even though we were proven that our modern marvels aren’t by any means invincible, we feel the same about our great inventions today just the same as we did before they were brought to their knees. The thought that an airplane or tower can be a living breathing organism can bring pure anxiety to any person around it. Goodheart incorporates this kind of personification into his essay and not only shows us its metaphorical human organism complex but also the confidence in which real humans entrusted into these creatures that are the face of modernity. The author states that the “exterior was merely its skin”, showing yet another form of personification but also implying that even though the exterior is so complex with all of its steel and glass, yet it is more complex on the inside, even so complex that we cannot see or understand its mysteries. The three main pieces to the tower include steel, glass, and electricity. These pieces are truly architectural innovations since “the Romans invented the arch and dome”. The early architects of the skyscraper period would put their office at the top floor of their buildings to show their confidence in their work but to also show the world what is becoming of modern technology. Through all this we realize their confidence, while may seem assuring to some, is irrelevant because the fall is inevitable.
Thomas McCarthy 1/24/12 Mr. Brown Analyzing Adam Goodheart
“The Skyscraper and the Airplane” The short story “The Skyscraper and the Airplane” was written by Adam Goodheart on the subject or the twin towers being attacked. His attack was not towards the people committing this horrid act, but of society today. Goodheart gives us many sentence strategies such as personification, metaphors, metonymy, and irony to bring forward his case, that society is fragile. He touches on our trust towards these machines though we willingly get in them and trust them with our lives. Adam Goodheart uses personification to emphasize the fragility of society on the subject of the twin towers. The author exemplifies this by referring to the airplane “whispering: trust me”, which in society today is a fragile characteristic, not being thrown around such as the word love. Trust takes a life’s time to completely earn. This shows us that we as a society do not trust these machines because of incidents pertinent to the twin towers. Today’s society warns each other about the use of these machines and their imminent danger that we seem to hide or somewhat purposely forget, especially in modern day movies such as “We are Marshall”, and even in children’s movies, “Madagascar 2” is a prime example of society’s early warning to distrust machines such as these. Another time Goodheart uses personification is when he says the machine, “teaches us.” In this use of personification I believe Goodheart is actually sending a warning or a foreshadowing to the future. Goodheart uses several examples such as this one and the allusion to Moses King (in which King wanted to create buildings and a city as complex as “The Jetsons”) to secretly explain that we will one day learn from the machines we have worked so diligently to create. We as a society have an unrealized fear of when this day will come, Goodheart brings this fear into realization. Metaphors are used by Goodheart such as “like the cell of a bee”, to bring us back to our human nature-a fragile society. Goodheart’s metaphors are mostly related to nature, this is his main strategy when dealing with metaphors. He also uses the metaphor “broken like a honey comb” and “as vertebrates instead of crustaceans.” The metaphor “city was broken like a honey comb” is a quote from E.M. Foster’s book in which Goodheart is indirectly referring to the twin towers crashing and burning to the ground like the city referred to by Foster. The author uses the metaphor, “Fatal Kiss” to give us the feeling of the exact time when the plane and the towers first touched for that split second before disaster when everything stood still, and people lives flashed before their very own eyes. This “fatal kiss” was the catalyst that caused the destruction of families and the sadness of a life time. This “fatal kiss” showed our true colors as a society, the society we live in is fragile towards disaster.
1/24/12 Analytical Paper Epic Title Adam Goodheart’s story “9.11.01:The Skyscraper and the Airplane” has many different writing strategies, with personification being his foremost trick. Within the second sentence of the story, he states “two man-made behemoths joined in a fatal kiss.” This shows the beginning of his main idea forming on the topic of how manufacturing materials in the likeliness of man is a foolish endeavor, by comparing a form of love and life with death. Goodheart continues using personification in the beginning of the very next paragraph, “The skyscraper and the airplane were born side by side, and ever since then have occupied adjacent rooms in our collective unconscious.” Here, the author proves his eminent proficiency with this particular writing strategy by showing two different personifications in one short sentence. He also brings about the main idea in a brighter light. Further examples include this quote near the center of the story, “For the first time, he explained, tall buildings were designed as vertebrates instead of crustaceans.” In this example of personification, Goodheart is merely emphasizing the irony in man’s desire to expand technology by trying to making it in his own self-likeness. Another prime writing strategy employed by Goodheart, is his use of irony. Early on in the story he provides a powerful ironic sentence strongly supporting his main idea, “Each an artificial shell of our own manufacture-or not quite of our own manufacture, since, strictly speaking, very few of us, as individuals, have any direct involvement in their creation.” Goodheart also provides a humorous form of irony to introduce the beginning of his concluding rites with a simple clause, “The architect of the World Trade Center, Minoru Yamasaki, was afraid of heights.” Not only is this sentence obviously ironic, but it also shows that not all engineers are concerned with modernity involving the idea of bigger and better. A final example of irony deserving presentment is in the concluding sentences of one of his paragraphs where Goodheart claims that, “The surest way to stay safe from fires, earthquakes, and bombs is never to go indoors. The surest way not to fall is to stay on the ground.” Primarily, Goodheart is saying that expansion will always be a dangerous game to play but people naturally want to roll the dice. The final strategy that Goodheart seems to make good use of, although not as prominently, is his figurative language, namely metaphors. When Goodheart describes the towers he states, “ Only at a great distance did they impress, jutting like a double bowsprit from the prow of Manhattan, from the prow of America itself.” He does not use much of his metaphors to strengthen his main idea, but rather, to spice up his descriptions and sentence flair. Another, rather long example, of Goodheart’s descriptions using figurative language, is in the concluding paragraph of the story, where he says, “It looked exactly as if the center of a volcano had somehow opened up among the downtown office buildings, and now was being probed and monitored by businesslike teams of geologists and seismologists, lest it erupt again without warning.” This quote is used as his final description of his view of the aftermath of 9/11.
Goodheart uses irony to enlighten us to the destructive nature of our technology. Goodheart call skyscrapers and airplanes “fragile containers for even-more-fragile flesh and blood,” depicting our own fragility versus our own machines, and the very thin gap in between. He calls us modern because we trust in the machines that we don’t understand, and have no part in their creation, the creation of destruction. Goodheart describes our modernity as “life long mysteries” in which we trust our lives to everyday, submitting to our ignorance of what could happen. He goes on to say that “both threatened us with such destruction, not just on that machine-bright morning in September, but long before,” returning to the thought that it is and always was destructive even before we created it. This suggests that everything we create is fated mistake waiting to happen. In his opening paragraph, Goodheart calls the crash of the two machines a “fatal kiss.” “Fatal, fated: perhaps even long foreseen.” The inevitability of destruction is a major motif that Goodheart plays on. The author even compares our inventions to things of safety such as the womb, “Entering, we pass into a place that promises -if rarely quite delivering-all the amenities of the womb: shelter, nourishment, warmth, dimness, [and] sleep.” This shows the awareness we have of the destructive power, yet we try to forget it and fill that void with happiness and comfort. Goodheart labels his own irony in one instance, “The irony of architecture, all architecture, is that we create structures to shelter ourselves, yet in building them, we set ourselves at risk. The surest way to stay safe from fires, earthquakes, and bombs is never to go indoors. The surest way not to fall is to stay on the ground.” He tells us straight forward that all our deeds have a “shadow double, a coequal act of destruction.” People spend their entire lives perfecting something that, in turn is almost “fated” to be caught up in the opposite intention, or use. The bigger we make them, the bigger potential for disaster. In his concluding paragraph Goodheart reflected on the eighth day after the collapse of the twin towers. He remembered ground-zero being “contained” by chain-linked fences and “squads of stolid cops” saying that these were all the signs of a Situation Under Control. This is irony in and of itself. We pretend and claim to always have control, and this puts people at rest. It gives them a false-sense of security, and even though they know better, they accept it. This situation was the complete opposite of under control. It was pure chaos. For modernity’s sake however, we had to think differently.
In Adam Goodheart's essay, 9.11.01 The Skyscraper and The Airplane, he expresses his uneasiness toward modern technology. He exemplifies the risk we undergo by relying and showing comfort around technology that has serious danger. Throughout his writing he points out that a higher level of fragility in society will occur from the more modern we become. Goodheart's main idea can be displayed through his sentence strategy level style of metaphors. These metaphors like "fatal kiss" and "one thin skin of metal and glass" present the plane and skyscraper with a sense of personification which illustrates the complexity and fragility and also engages the audience with a feeling of empathy. This fragility of the "two man-made behemoths" in return shows the fragileness of society in today's modern age with all of its technological advancements. Goodheart even includes a more blunt example of personification in the sentence "If the skyscraper, with its crudely phallic thrust, is male, the airplane is female" followed by the statement that entering, we pass into a place that promises all amenities of the womb- shelter, nourishment, warmth, dimness, sleep. The author mentions the idea given by Freud of "collective unconscious" which means the things we know but do not think about such as breathing, metabolism, blinking, or sexual desires. He uses this idea to explain how people of this new era overlook the dangers of the advanced technology and bring disaster upon themselves. Goodheart used another sentence level strategy to support his main idea, irony. In paragraph seventeen on page three hundred seven, the author writes about air travel being "the most common way individuals surrender control and voluntarily place themselves in harm's way" and a time when "we toy with fantasies of annihilation". Why would anyone want to voluntarily do something that puts themselves in harm's way with no control and a chance of death? I find this as an ironic piece in the story where Goodman attempts to show the weakness in our modern society by arousing his audience's thoughts. An additional example of irony in the essay was "the world of skyscrapers and airplanes is one in which terrorists stalk freely among their prey". After September eleventh, we citizens of the United States especially know that terrorists do prey on planes and skyscrapers. This quote made me wonder why would you want to build an object that would be an ideal opportunity for a terrorist to attack which will ultimately lead to the deaths of many people. The author has once again showed our "collective unconscious". Goodheart throughout the essay follows a chronological pattern in his writing. His use of the anaphora "before the fire, before the ash, before the bodies" shows his respect for the word "before" which displays the importance of time. He wants the audience to acknowledge that the old times have passed and a new period has come where there are advancements of all kind. These advancements cause ignorance because it is impossible to be capable of knowing all specifics of every subject. This is why we now have people who specialize in one topic and study it to a great detail. Although we have specialists, we now have a fragile spot in our civilization because a person may be a lawyer and extensively know about traffic court but on the other hand could not tell you a thing about civil court cases. The author employs that advancements carry the cede of destruction.
Chris Woiwode In Adam Goodheart’s 9.11.01: The Skyscraper and the Airplane there are many rhetorical devices used to suggest and support the point that modernity brings with it death, destruction and fragility. The devices include personification, metaphor, metonym and allusion. Each help prove the point in their own way: personification helps us relate and shows the possibility of death, metonym and metaphor compare to show fragility, and allusion is used to reinforce. The author employs metaphor to compare technology to people and convey their fragility. For example, “two man made behemoths joined in a fatal kiss,” brings forth the idea of death. Using the word ‘fatal’ makes the point in this quote because fatal suggests fate, and fate suggests death. Also in the quote, “the airplane and the skyscraper were born side by side,” using the word ‘born’ associates the idea of fragility with youth. Goodheart personifies the two technologic giants, again, in order to convey the idea of fragility. In the same quote from before the author uses the word ‘born’ to personify the two machines so that we, as people, can relate to them. He also uses the word ‘kiss’ to personify them further. By personifying the objects he suggests death and fragility once more and associates the ideas to modernity. The author uses allusion in The Skyscraper and the Airplane not only to give examples of modern technology’s fragility and destruction but also point out those who agree with him throughout history. For example, a quote from Carl Marx, “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world-and, at the same time, threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.” This quote points out that for a person to be modern they are also fragile, they are also vulnerable. Goodheart also incorporates simile to put forth his point about how modernity also forces fragility. By saying “For the first time, he explained, tall buildings were designed as vertebrates instead of crustaceans,” he points out the evolution of architecture and points out the ability to build more with less, which then makes the structure weak. Another simile that is employed is “When the earliest buildings to be called skyscrapers appeared, in the 1870s and 1880s, they sprang into shape so suddenly as to seem born in a single piece.” This simile not just further personifies the object, but also points out its fragility in another way. It makes the building of a skyscraper from that time seem like quick work and most people associate quick work with shoddy work at best, once again, hinting at the fragility of the structure. Lastly, the author uses metonym to display his point. In the quotes, “Before the fire, before the ash, before the bodies tumbling solitary through space, one thin skin of metal and glass met another,” and, “Skyscraper and airplane: fragile containers for even-more-fragile flesh and blood,” the author employs metonyms to either personify or belittle the technological giants to make them seem fragile and human like. This continues to feed his point that modernity is immediately associated with fragility. Not just fragility of our own invention but the fragility of ourselves as well.
In Goodheart’s essay on 9/11, he explores the impact of the event on Americans in terms of modernity. Delving into the treacherous consequences of technological advancement, he describes the tragedy with a fatalistic approach. In meddling with the laws of physics, we should have seen its inevitability. He conveys our preoccupation that all is well in the world as a very ignorant one. The author uses irony, often in the form of paradoxes, to expose the fragility within modern society, a society that at the same time seems bent on pursuing inhuman levels of security. Irony is effective in expressing Goodheart’s central thesis that modernity accelerates our race into our most fundamental fears, because it serves as a snap back to reality from our preconceived notions of the world around us. He inquires into irony that even the most frequent flyers take each flight as a “near death” experience. The passengers’ mental stalemate between trusting the aircraft and fearing gravity only subsides when they return to land. It is almost impossible to justly feel safe in an airplane without knowing its technological intricacies, yet ironically enough, we find ourselves most in these types of institutions. by drilling an almost religious faith in that which we misunderstand the most, our society can live in bliss. To advance the idea that our society lives in ignorance leaving the worrying to the specialists, Goodheart uses of apposition. He renames skyscrapers and airplanes as, “ fragile containers for even-more-fragile flesh and blood.” by explicitly explaining the treacherous nature of our modernity, he insinuates first that we need the explaination, and secondly the inevitable tragedy to come. “ the first truly revolutionary architectural innovation since the Romans invented the arch and the dome two millennia before,” is used to describe our societies ability to make cheap, high quality structural steel in order to further expose our lack of knowledge of the most prominent advancement of our society. By asserting that most of his audience lacks pertinent knowledge while exhibiting his through apposition, Goodheart conveys that his conclusions are credible. You might think that with all these allegations of ignorance the author comes off as pompous, but he uses accumulation to create menacing lists of our society’s technological life support systems. Lists like, “electric lights and central heating, passenger elevators and fire escapes, telephones and flush toilets,” serve to reveal the never ending complexity that is modernity making our ignorance a justifiable one. And since the general public does not understand the inter-workings of our modern technologies, Goodheart points to our society’s need to specialize our professions. “Centrally managed electric and gas companies, sewer systems, water mains, fire departments, elevator inspectors, telephone operators, trash collectors,” hammer the point that the idea of being cognizant of even the most basic modern technologies is impossible.
Will Phillips AP English Goodheart Essay Adam Goodheart is able to use a variety of literary devices to improve his short stoy "The Skyscraper and the Airplane." Goodheart conveys to the reader the fragility and delicacy of the human life. He also addresses the trust that we haphazardly place in our modern technology, and the dangers associated with such. The author highlights the dynamics of the events of the 9/11 tragedy, the preceding events, and how we view them. The writer employs allusion, metaphor, irony and quotations into his work all to help illustate and reinforce his main themes of human fragility, vunerability, a sense of inevitability, and the unnaturality of modern techonological and architecturral advances. Goodheart applies allusion to provide relatable examples throughout the short story in presenting the background history for planes, skyscrapers, and all those involved in their constructionas well as to emphasize the themes of inevitabilty and fatalism. The author alludes to the first ever flight, staged by the Wright brothers, by saying, “Just five years after the first scrawny aircraft left the ground at Kitty Hawk…” This gives us context and historical perspective. The use of the word scrawny ironically foreshadows the bulky and extravagant modern airplanes. Later, he mentions a short story by E. M. Forrester in which “Humans lived in huge structures composed of tiny, airless chambers…leaving them to travel in huge structures that criss-cross the globe.” Goodheart is attempting to establish that the creation of skyscrapers and airplanes was inevitable, but so too was their eventual collision. Additionally, he makes an allusion to the typical airline meals in stating, “The airline offers us a promise of sustenance; in eating, we accept.” In doing so, he indicates that we are given the meals as a token of trust from the airline and that we must accept. He also sheds light on the irony that airlines offer us sustenance of life yet possess the ability to take our lives and the responsibility not to do so.
Irony is another key part of Goodheart’s work as he uses it to express the bizarre natural incongruities in the ideas of the skyscraper, the airplane, and other creations of modernity and also to articulate the devistating impacts when these creations fail us. He varies its usage so that for a given instance irony could either lighten the mood or convey a devastating truth. Goodheart states, “…machines teach us…” which is ironic because we are the ones who are supposed to be “teaching” (or programming) machines. It scares humans to think that a machine possesses the ability to know, or do, what we cannot, and we find it alarmingly unnatural. Furthermore, the author says, “ the race to scrape the sky lifted off the ground”: a light use of irony intended for humor. Moreover, Goodheart speaks on the victims of the 9/11 tragedy calling them “so close together…so far from family and friends” Two utterly opposite ideas, moods, associations and connotations are brought together into a single sentence to emphasize the significance, danger, and impact of the situation and also to . Additionally, Goodheart is able to use irony to relay a profound truth with his statement that “The surest way not to fall is to stay on the ground.” He is saying that we must not dwell on the past event of destruction and must be willing to continue moving forward in technology, as well as in architecture, which is ironic in and of itself because of Goodheart's seemingly negative attitude toward technological advancements. Goodheart is able, also, to take advantage of the use of metaphor to reiterate his ideas of fate, inevitability, and absurdity within the very idea of a skyscraper. He compares the metal and glass of the skyscraper and airplane to skin, giving it human characteristics and therefore signifying tenderness and an absense of the immortality with which we tend to view them, also subtly foreshadowing the "death" that it will experience. The author states, “…tall buildings were designed as vertebrates instead of crustaceans.” He provides the reader with an example for clarity and explanation. Additionally, he compares the World trade center “a pair of middle fingers, raised against the hostile vastness of the Atlantic Ocean.” The thought the middle finger instantly invokes a negative feeling in us because of what it represents. The author uses such an example to express a feeling of resentment toward the buildings and to provide insight into the perspect of other countries. Yet another metaphor used by the author is his comparison of the twin towers to “two mountains of trapped kinetic energy, perpetually poised at the brink of release.” He implies that the towers were always destined, waiting to fall, which brings about a deep sense of fear within us. Goodheart makes an ongoing metaphorical comparison between the airplane and the skyscraper throughout the short story as well.
Daniel Todesca January 24, 2012 Unlike many essays or passages about 9/11, Goodheart only briefly talks about terrorists or even how tragic and catastrophic the actual event was. Instead he shifts his main topic to the two objects that technically caused 9/11, the skyscraper and the airplane. In his essay, Goodheart uses many different sentence level strategies to cause different effects within the passage. Some of these strategies are metaphors, irony, and the use of colons. One of the first appearances of metaphor is when he tells of a engineer describing that for the first time, tall buildings are built “as vertebrates instead of crustaceans.” The use of comparing two different biological animals gives almost a Darwinian aspect to the quote, stating that buildings are now evolving. To say that buildings, at the time of the quote, were evolving implies that they are changing for the better. Goodheart, on the other hand, doesn’t agree with this notion at all. He believes that we should be cautious of new technology and not just accept and trust it with your own life so readily just because people, like the engineer, say it’s how we, as human kind, are evolving. Tall buildings serve a purpose by making a lot of space because they build upward while still keeping the space occupied on the ground respectively minimal. Though buildings like skyscrapers, such as the World Trade Center, do much more than your average “tall” building. Skyscrapers are a way of showing technological progress, or a statement basically saying “look at us! We have evolved, and therefore we are better than you.” Early in his essay he states how the collision of the skyscraper and the airplane were “fated” or even “foreseen.”Goodheart describes that the twin towers were “like a pair of middle fingers, raised against the hostile vastness of the Atlantic.” This metaphor expresses Goodheart’s thoughts on how the skyscraper as a symbol of power and how the towers may have been taunting gesture all along and an attack was “fated” or bound to happen. Goodheart’s essay as a whole was ironic within itself. The fact that an American was writing on a topic of a terrible recent tragedy and then turning around and basically saying it was bound to happen and we should have seen it coming is completely ironic. Other than the overall irony of the passage, Goodheart also used irony in small doses within his essay. At one point he writes “When Yamasaki created buildings on an unprecedented scale, he also created the potential for disaster on a unprecedented scale.” This is ironic because the concern of the entire project of building skyscrapers was to make something that has never been done before, to triumph over gravity, and to evolve into the future. No one thought to think that with the accomplishment of something so great and so “breath-taking”, there was an opportunity for a “breath-taking” catastrophe. He demonstrates the same idea when he writes “Every act of creation has its shadow double, a coequal act of destruction.” A strategy frequently used through the essay is Goodheart’s use of the colon. He uses the colon to build up suspense within the sentence. Suspense is built up by only a few words followed by the colon. After the colon the ideas reflect upon the few words before the colon in a rapid fashion. It is almost like the crash between the airplane and the skyscraper. Like a plane the first few words come slow and un noticed, then the colon appears acting like the moment a on looker may begin to think to himself, “Hey, that plane seems to be heading dangerously toward that skyscraper,” and finally the last string of words is like the moment of the crash with many words and ideas all rapidly fired one after another.
Goodheart uses metaphors to compare the skyscraper and the airplane to normal things that we would consider fragile. The sentence “Each, (the skyscraper and the airplane) an artificial shell of our own creation,” compares the two inventions to a flimsy artificial shell, which we put our entire trust in nonetheless. He claims that they are “Tall buildings (that) were designed as vertebrates instead of crustaceans” to compare the skyscraper to something small and fragile and breaking down the idea and method behind the skyscraper into its simplest form. The skyscraper seems so complex because of its size, but this brings it down to the weak, understandable size of an insect. This all points back to the main idea of fragility in modern society. We put total trust into fragile objects that could malfunction at any second – just a cable broken, a wrong button pushed, or an incompetent pilot could send the entire thing down. It shows that our society is just as fragile as the things we put our trust in. He uses an allusion to bring in what we are possibly most afraid of. The human element. All airplanes require a pilot to operate them and this opens an entire new possibility of things going wrong. He alludes to a seminar held by American Airlines, in which employees of the airline tell them “Airplanes do not drop, dive, plummet, or fall.” He claims that we must “Surrender [ourselves]… to the wisdom and expertise of corporations, pilots, governments, engineers” , to show that not only do we have to trust the invention, but also the people who invented it and are operating it. He points out that we must trust “in the faceless engineers who built it, in the corporations that own and maintain it.” This causes us more fear because humans can’t get over the possibility of human error, and that no matter how hard we try, we can’t remove that possibility of human error from our inventions. We constantly worry over the simplest of things – will he make it on time, did he take out the trash, did he feed the dogs – yet we will put our lives in the hands of total strangers. With this not only is he pointing to the fragility of modern society, but also to our over-dependence on technology. We are willing to trust a machine but the second a human is involved we can’t take it. We want our technology to do everything, including taking the place of the human. We won’t be satisfied until machines are able to think for as well. Goodheart employs irony to show the insecurity of the inventions and the trust we must put in our technology. He claims that “we create structures to shelter ourselves, yet in building them, we set ourselves at risk,” which points to people taking a risk with their lives by entering the structures of modernity. He states that “[People] entrust their lives, on a daily basis, to technologies whose inner workings remained a mystery” to illustrate that we put our lives into the hands of objects that we know nothing about – how it flies, how the engines operate, how the steering works. We know nothing about the operating or potential failings of the airplane yet we will risk everything when we enter it. We don’t want to know about the potential problems of the airplane, because that might scare us. It proves that ignorance is bliss. He uses the architect of the World Trade Center being “afraid of heights” to show that not even the man who was making the skyscraper and knew how it operated, was secure while in it. We all have these fears, but just like him we must swallow our fears in order to cross the plain into the skyscraper. In order to trust these things, we must ignore everything that makes them dangerous.
9.11.01: The Skyscraper and the Airplane is an essay by Adam Goodheart in which he mainly discusses the nature of skyscrapers and airplanes. In the essay, Goodheart discusses the factors that play into the modernity of these technological advances. Goodheart’s essay primarily serves to point out that, while we are become more modern, our society is also becoming more at risk due to the fragility of the technology.
ReplyDeleteGoodheart uses irony throughout his essay to demonstrate this. For example, Goodheart opens paragraph twenty by saying that “The architect of the World Trade Center, Minoru Yamasak, was afraid of heights.” He goes on to point out in paragraph twenty-one that the purpose of architecture is to provide shelter, yet they are also putting us at risk. Furthermore, Goodheart explains that airplanes “fascinate us… because part of us always imagined them falling.” This points out that the only way we can truly love something is if we fear it going away. The essay is concluded by Goodheart commenting on a helicopter that was above ground zero shortly after the attack. He points out the Irony that another “miraculously suspended” flying machine is just above where the airplane had just brought about destruction.
The author also uses personification of airplanes and skyscrapers in order to emphasize their fragility. The personification also serves to make the reader feel more emphatic towards the topic. In the first paragraph, Goodheart describes the collision of the glass and metal “skins” of the airplane and the Twin Towers. Goodheart uses personification again later in the paragraph by describing the collision this time as a “fatal kiss.” The word “fatal” not only emphasizes fragility, but also the idea of inevitability. Throughout paragraph nineteen, Goodheart compares the security that we are meant to feel in an airplane to the safety of a mother’s womb. By comparing airplanes to fetuses, he further emphasizes the general theme of fragility.
Additionally, Goodwill frequently employs allusions in order emphasize the modernity and complexity of airplanes and skyscrapers. For example, in paragraph eight, he goes into detail about the history of the word “skyscraper,” and when it was first used to describe tall buildings. The author alludes to this in order to make us realize that we truly have technological advancements when we have to invent new words for them. Goodheart goes on to cite Antione de Saint-Exupery as predicting that “within a generation or two… The airplane would seem a perfectly common place thing.” This quote is used to show that things that are technologically advanced in one era may not be technologically advanced later on. Additionally, Goodheart credits Elisha Graves Otis for his contributions to the design and safety of the skyscraper. He then goes on to explain that “for the first time in human history, millions of ordinary people would be required to entrust their lives, on a daily basis, to technologies whose inner workings remained a mystery.” Goodwill states this in order to demonstrate that the modernity of our civilization today as reached the point where we don’t even know how it works.
Chase Lyndale
ReplyDelete1-24-12
9.11.01: The Skyscraper and the Airplane is an essay by Adam Goodheart that deals with the modern world we have created and the fragile nature of it. He also makes us wonder why we have become so comfortable with the world that we have created as it is very unnatural, with our two main inventions skyscrapers and airplanes terrifying us. Goodheart uses four strategies to help prove his main point, those strategies being irony, metaphor, allusions, and long complex sentences. He uses each one of these strategies to amplify and reinforce Goodheart’s main point subtly turning us to what he believes. Of course, he uses other strategies but these four are the most important.
Goodheart uses irony to point out the incongruities between the modern culture that we live in and the fragile nature of it. He uses irony because the main point that irony deals with is the incongruities of life. One example of irony that Goodheart uses is “the architect of the world trade center was afraid of heights.” By pointing out the fact that even those who dream of building skyscrapers are terrified of them, he shows that they are unnatural and most people feel uncomfortable in them. Another of Goodheart’s metaphors is “The irony of architecture… we set ourselves at risk.” He is saying that even though we create the skyscrapers and buildings we are terrified of what we create because it has created the possibility for disaster on a grand scale. One more example of irony is “Each a rig that suspends us far above the ground, half-willing aerialists, and then whispers: trust me.” In this sentence, Goodheart points out the incongruity that even though flight is essential we are all still afraid of planes on a subconscious level. Goodheart uses irony because it is perfect to make us subtly think about how completely unnatural this modern world is that we have created.
Goodheart uses metaphors to turn us slyly against skyscrapers and planes, things we have come to revere
A metaphor that he uses is, “like a pair of middle fingers, raised against the hostile vastness of the Atlantic Ocean.” By comparing the skyscrapers to middle fingers, he makes us subtly angry because middle fingers create anger in the majority of people. This manipulates us into thinking that skyscrapers are bad helping prove his point that we have created an unnatural modern world. Another example of metaphor would be when he says, “he designed the World Trade Center with narrow windows framed by vertical columns like prison bars”. By comparing the trade center to prisons, he once again makes us subtly turn against skyscrapers and what they stand for. One last metaphor that Goodheart uses is “Two manmade behemoths joined in a fatal kiss.” This connects skyscrapers with fatality and death in our minds by using the word fatal, so we once again dislike skyscrapers. All of his metaphors make us turn against the modern world that we have created.
ReplyDeleteGoodheart also uses allusions to help make his point by helping tell the story of the development of modernity. The allusions also lend him credibility that is needed in a paper like this because he is on the verge of attacking 9/11, which is a major taboo in America so his command of the facts forces us to respect his opinion. One example of allusion in the paper is, “in that same year, 1908, E.M. Foster wrote a short story envisioning a world of the future where humans lived in a huge structures composed of tiny, airless champers,… Pekin is just like Shrewsbury”. This allusion first shows off his knowledge of literature but it also makes us connect the current world we live in with the dystopian world foster created. It also goes on to describe the destruction of that world leading us to believe that will happen to ours. Another example of metaphor is “The cultural critic Marshall Berman… All that is solid melts into air.” In bringing in this allusion, he once more establishes his complete grasp of his subject and gives us something to think about in respect to what the critic says about being modern. These allusions serve to give more substance the argument.
One last strategy that he uses is to lengthen his sentences with hyphens and colons. An example of him using the hyphens would be in the sentence, “… , high quality structural steel-the first truly revolution…”. An example of Goodheart using colons to lengthen his sentences would be “Try to imagine them there, suspended: two man-made behemoths joined in a fatal kiss.” By breaking the sentences up like this, he sets up a parallel with the collision of 9/11 that he describes at the end of the paper. The first half of the sentence sets up the punch line that the second half of the sentence produces in a collision with the first half. This sentence level strategy is very subtle but is also very effective.
“The Skyscraper and The Airplane” expresses a general dislike for modernity. Goodheart employs his ideas about society not being informed about the dangers that come with our technology. Of course they benefit our schedules, but they also threaten our lives. We depend too much on the technology that surrounds us, and without it, society could not function. If something goes wrong in our lives we blame it on an object rather than taking matters into our own hands to learn how to fix our own problems.
ReplyDeleteGoodheart uses irony to express how our society is fragile and to express that our technology is dangerous. He compares a skyscraper to an airplane “joined in a fatal kiss” to exemplify how our technologies put us at risk. This quote gives us a sense of reality for flying and being in a skyscraper, and makes us think twice about whether to trust our beloved technology. For instance he says “we create structures to shelter ourselves, yet in building them, we set ourselves at risk” to show that we never think about what could happen to us if they did end up failing. People never think about who will be navigating the airplane that they are flying on, or the architect who built the skyscraper they are standing in. It is a scary thought, but it is something we need to be aware of before we put our lives in the hands of our technology. The author also uses irony to employ that our society is fragile. For instance he tells us how “the architect of the world Trade Center, Minoru Yamashi, was afraid of heights”. Goodheart brings up the architect’s fear of heights to back up his point of how our society is weak. We rely on our technology not to fail, and if it did have a malfunction no one would know how to fix it or even know where to start.
Goodheart uses accumulation in his writing to depict the complexity of our modern society. In paragraph 18 on page 307, he states that “flying requires an act of almost religious faith” to describe the trust we put in the “corporations, pilots, governments, engineers” who are controlling whether we crash and die. We do not understand how flying works, so that is why we pay other people to do it for us. If something went wrong we would have no clue of what to do to save our lives and the lives of others. Technology is a good thing, but we need to take the responsibility of learning to live with failure because it is inevitable that one day our knowledge will be needed.
Goodheart uses anaphora to portray that modern society’s knowledge about our amenities is not where it should be, and we need to become aware of how our technology works. He also uses anaphora to describe how precious our human life is, and that we need to know what we are doing before we put our lives in danger. In paragraph 4 he says that airplanes and skyscrapers are “fragile containers for even more fragile flesh and blood “to exemplify how important human life is. He then goes on to start several clauses in a row with the word “each” to describe the similarities of how the skyscraper and the airplane trap us in chambers far above the ground to teach us one similar thing, “how to be modern”. Learning how to be modern is more like learning how to use someone else’s product, instead of knowing how it is made or how to fix it.
Patrick Guthrie
ReplyDeleteAP English
January 24, 2012
Mr. Brown
“The Skyscraper and the Airplane” is a short story written by Adam Goodheart that tries to give the events of 9/11 some sort of explanation. The question that is commonly brought up is whether not we are safe in the modern world we inhabit today. Goodheart tries to answer what it means to be modern and because we are modern does it make us safer or are there we just as delicate and fragile because of all the new problems technology has developed. Through different rhetorical strategies, Goodheart tries to answer this question.
Goodheart employs metaphors in the form of in the form of personification of airplanes and skyscrapers to show their humanlike weakness and vulnerability. These massive steel structures were thought of as almost invincible because they were really involved in tragedy until 9/11. Goodheart refers to both planes and skyscrapers as having skin this gives them humanlike qualities. Skin is thought to be somewhat weak and vulnerable that is why in battle it is often armored in battle. The vulnerability of modern society and humans is shown here by comparing the two. In a different part of the story, planes and skyscrapers are referred to as fragile containers with even more fragile cargo. This furthermore demonstrates the fragility and vulnerability of humans and their modern way of living.
Another rhetorical strategy used by the author throughout the story was irony. During the entire short story, the idea of the modern age is discussed. With this idea of modernity comes about thoughts of safety. Modern things are thought to be safe, but the events of 9/11 contradict all of these presumptions. This irony is shown in the story when Goodheart speaks of the strength of steel which made both the skyscraper and the airplane a possibility. The irony is that the strength of the steel did very little when the two collided. This shows that just because society is modern we are not safe because new problems that could be foreseen appear.
Goodheart incorporates many allusions in his writing to prove some of his points and to add to some of the irony in the story. One allusion is about the engineer who built the twin towers. The ironic part is that he is afraid of heights. Another allusion used by the author is a quote from a book by Karl Marx. The quote is about the meaning to be modern. It speaks about modern the modern world as having joy, power, and growth. It also says that there is a threat that everything can be destroyed. The events of 9/11 were an example of this power and growth being destroyed.
Goodheart incorporates several rhetorical styles such as allusions, metaphors, the anaphora, and irony. He uses these strategies in order to show his views about modernity and the deterministic inevitability of these great inventions collapsing. He compares our new marvels to older marvels such as the Titanic. He personifies the skyscraper and illustrates all of its mysterious complexities. Through all this we can see that these new technologies can fall just as easily as they can rise.
ReplyDeleteThe allusion is first introduced in the opening epigraph by Thomas Hardy. He includes this poem in order to show that society puts its entire trust in to technology. He mentions the “smart ship” which implies the titanic and how it had met its match, the iceberg. He glorifies the new technology “in stature, grace, and hue”, but he shows us its mortality “in shadowy silent distance grew the iceberg too”, in order to be able to compare the Titanic’s apparent invincibility to the modern skyscraper and airplane, but also explain its defeat. Another piece of writing that the author includes is a quote by Karl Marx that states, “to be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world-and, at the same time, that threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.” This powerful quote helps Goodheart express his feelings towards the good about modernity but also its mortality.
Goodheart integrates the metaphor in order to support his ideology that our modernity is untouchable but at the same time so vulnerable. “Like a pair of middle fingers raised against the hostile vastness of the Atlantic Ocean” is his way of saying that our American modernity is supposedly more superior to the rest of the worlds. Our skyscrapers and airplanes are our own inventions created in order to ease our way of life but also to boost our human egotistical feelings. Every day we entrust our lives into something that can’t be seen or understood. We trust the engineering behind these modern marvels.
In the first paragraph Goodheart is able to incorporate the anaphora in which he repeats the word before, “before the fire, before the ash, before the bodies”. He keeps repeating before in order to show how we felt before the catastrophe ever happened and how, even though we were proven that our modern marvels aren’t by any means invincible, we feel the same about our great inventions today just the same as we did before they were brought to their knees.
The thought that an airplane or tower can be a living breathing organism can bring pure anxiety to any person around it. Goodheart incorporates this kind of personification into his essay and not only shows us its metaphorical human organism complex but also the confidence in which real humans entrusted into these creatures that are the face of modernity. The author states that the “exterior was merely its skin”, showing yet another form of personification but also implying that even though the exterior is so complex with all of its steel and glass, yet it is more complex on the inside, even so complex that we cannot see or understand its mysteries. The three main pieces to the tower include steel, glass, and electricity. These pieces are truly architectural innovations since “the Romans invented the arch and dome”. The early architects of the skyscraper period would put their office at the top floor of their buildings to show their confidence in their work but to also show the world what is becoming of modern technology. Through all this we realize their confidence, while may seem assuring to some, is irrelevant because the fall is inevitable.
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ReplyDeleteThomas McCarthy
ReplyDelete1/24/12
Mr. Brown
Analyzing Adam Goodheart
“The Skyscraper and the Airplane”
The short story “The Skyscraper and the Airplane” was written by Adam Goodheart on the subject or the twin towers being attacked. His attack was not towards the people committing this horrid act, but of society today. Goodheart gives us many sentence strategies such as personification, metaphors, metonymy, and irony to bring
forward his case, that society is fragile. He touches on our trust towards these machines though we willingly get in them and trust them with our lives.
Adam Goodheart uses personification to emphasize the fragility of society on the subject of the twin towers. The author exemplifies this by referring to the airplane
“whispering: trust me”, which in society today is a fragile characteristic, not being thrown around such as the word love. Trust takes a life’s time to completely earn. This shows us that we as a society do not trust these machines because of incidents pertinent to the twin towers. Today’s society warns each other about the use of these machines and their imminent danger that we seem to hide or somewhat purposely forget, especially in modern day movies such as “We are Marshall”, and even in children’s movies, “Madagascar 2” is a prime example of society’s early warning to distrust machines such as these. Another time Goodheart uses personification is when he says the machine,
“teaches us.” In this use of personification I believe Goodheart is actually sending a warning or a foreshadowing to the future. Goodheart uses several examples such as this one and the allusion to Moses King (in which King wanted to create buildings and a city as complex as “The Jetsons”) to secretly explain that we will one day learn from the machines we have worked so diligently to create. We as a society have an unrealized fear of when this day will come, Goodheart brings this fear into realization.
Metaphors are used by Goodheart such as “like the cell of a bee”, to bring us back to our human nature-a fragile society. Goodheart’s metaphors are mostly related to nature, this is his main strategy when dealing with metaphors. He also uses the metaphor “broken like a honey comb” and “as vertebrates instead of crustaceans.” The metaphor “city was broken like a honey comb” is a quote from E.M. Foster’s book in which Goodheart is indirectly referring to the twin towers crashing and burning to the ground like the city referred to by Foster. The author uses the metaphor, “Fatal Kiss” to give us the feeling of the exact time when the plane and the towers first touched for that split
second before disaster when everything stood still, and people lives flashed before their very own eyes. This “fatal kiss” was the catalyst that caused the destruction of families and the sadness of a life time. This “fatal kiss” showed our true colors as a society, the society we live in is fragile towards disaster.
Sam Coppola
ReplyDelete1/24/12
Analytical Paper
Epic Title
Adam Goodheart’s story “9.11.01:The Skyscraper and the Airplane” has many different writing strategies, with personification being his foremost trick. Within the second sentence of the story, he states “two man-made behemoths joined in a fatal kiss.” This shows the beginning of his main idea forming on the topic of how manufacturing materials in the likeliness of man is a foolish endeavor, by comparing a form of love and life with death. Goodheart continues using personification in the beginning of the very next paragraph, “The skyscraper and the airplane were born side by side, and ever since then have occupied adjacent rooms in our collective unconscious.” Here, the author proves his eminent proficiency with this particular writing strategy by showing two different personifications in one short sentence. He also brings about the main idea in a brighter light. Further examples include this quote near the center of the story, “For the first time, he explained, tall buildings were designed as vertebrates instead of crustaceans.” In this example of personification, Goodheart is merely emphasizing the irony in man’s desire to expand technology by trying to making it in his own self-likeness.
Another prime writing strategy employed by Goodheart, is his use of irony. Early on in the story he provides a powerful ironic sentence strongly supporting his main idea,
“Each an artificial shell of our own manufacture-or not quite of our own manufacture, since, strictly speaking, very few of us, as individuals, have any direct involvement in their creation.” Goodheart also provides a humorous form of irony to introduce the beginning of his concluding rites with a simple clause, “The architect of the World Trade Center, Minoru Yamasaki, was afraid of heights.” Not only is this sentence obviously ironic, but it also shows that not all engineers are concerned with modernity involving the idea of bigger and better. A final example of irony deserving presentment is in the concluding sentences of one of his paragraphs where Goodheart claims that, “The surest way to stay safe from fires, earthquakes, and bombs is never to go indoors. The surest way not to fall is to stay on the ground.” Primarily, Goodheart is saying that expansion will always be a dangerous game to play but people naturally want to roll the dice.
The final strategy that Goodheart seems to make good use of, although not as prominently, is his figurative language, namely metaphors. When Goodheart describes the towers he states, “ Only at a great distance did they impress, jutting like a double bowsprit from the prow of Manhattan, from the prow of America itself.” He does not use much of his metaphors to strengthen his main idea, but rather, to spice up his descriptions and sentence flair. Another, rather long example, of Goodheart’s descriptions using figurative language, is in the concluding paragraph of the story, where he says, “It looked exactly as if the center of a volcano had somehow opened up among the downtown office buildings, and now was being probed and monitored by businesslike teams of geologists and seismologists, lest it erupt again without warning.” This quote is used as his final description of his view of the aftermath of 9/11.
Benjamin Cannoles
ReplyDeleteGoodheart uses irony to enlighten us to the destructive nature of our technology. Goodheart call skyscrapers and airplanes “fragile containers for even-more-fragile flesh and blood,” depicting our own fragility versus our own machines, and the very thin gap in between. He calls us modern because we trust in the machines that we don’t understand, and have no part in their creation, the creation of destruction. Goodheart describes our modernity as “life long mysteries” in which we trust our lives to everyday, submitting to our ignorance of what could happen. He goes on to say that “both threatened us with such destruction, not just on that machine-bright morning in September, but long before,” returning to the thought that it is and always was destructive even before we created it. This suggests that everything we create is fated mistake waiting to happen. In his opening paragraph, Goodheart calls the crash of the two machines a “fatal kiss.” “Fatal, fated: perhaps even long foreseen.” The inevitability of destruction is a major motif that Goodheart plays on. The author even compares our inventions to things of safety such as the womb, “Entering, we pass into a place that promises -if rarely quite delivering-all the amenities of the womb: shelter, nourishment, warmth, dimness, [and] sleep.” This shows the awareness we have of the destructive power, yet we try to forget it and fill that void with happiness and comfort.
Goodheart labels his own irony in one instance, “The irony of architecture, all architecture, is that we create structures to shelter ourselves, yet in building them, we set ourselves at risk. The surest way to stay safe from fires, earthquakes, and bombs is never to go indoors. The surest way not to fall is to stay on the ground.” He tells us straight forward that all our deeds have a “shadow double, a coequal act of destruction.” People spend their entire lives perfecting something that, in turn is almost “fated” to be caught up in the opposite intention, or use. The bigger we make them, the bigger potential for disaster. In his concluding paragraph Goodheart reflected on the eighth day after the collapse of the twin towers. He remembered ground-zero being “contained” by chain-linked fences and “squads of stolid cops” saying that these were all the signs of a Situation Under Control. This is irony in and of itself. We pretend and claim to always have control, and this puts people at rest. It gives them a false-sense of security, and even though they know better, they accept it. This situation was the complete opposite of under control. It was pure chaos. For modernity’s sake however, we had to think differently.
In Adam Goodheart's essay, 9.11.01 The Skyscraper and The Airplane, he expresses his uneasiness toward modern technology. He exemplifies the risk we undergo by relying and showing comfort around technology that has serious danger. Throughout his writing he points out that a higher level of fragility in society will occur from the more modern we become.
ReplyDeleteGoodheart's main idea can be displayed through his sentence strategy level style of metaphors. These metaphors like "fatal kiss" and "one thin skin of metal and glass" present the plane and skyscraper with a sense of personification which illustrates the complexity and fragility and also engages the audience with a feeling of empathy. This fragility of the "two man-made behemoths" in return shows the fragileness of society in today's modern age with all of its technological advancements. Goodheart even includes a more blunt example of personification in the sentence "If the skyscraper, with its crudely phallic thrust, is male, the airplane is female" followed by the statement that entering, we pass into a place that promises all amenities of the womb- shelter, nourishment, warmth, dimness, sleep. The author mentions the idea given by Freud of "collective unconscious" which means the things we know but do not think about such as breathing, metabolism, blinking, or sexual desires. He uses this idea to explain how people of this new era overlook the dangers of the advanced technology and bring disaster upon themselves.
Goodheart used another sentence level strategy to support his main idea, irony. In paragraph seventeen on page three hundred seven, the author writes about air travel being "the most common way individuals surrender control and voluntarily place themselves in harm's way" and a time when "we toy with fantasies of annihilation". Why would anyone want to voluntarily do something that puts themselves in harm's way with no control and a chance of death? I find this as an ironic piece in the story where Goodman attempts to show the weakness in our modern society by arousing his audience's thoughts. An additional example of irony in the essay was "the world of skyscrapers and airplanes is one in which terrorists stalk freely among their prey". After September eleventh, we citizens of the United States especially know that terrorists do prey on planes and skyscrapers. This quote made me wonder why would you want to build an object that would be an ideal opportunity for a terrorist to attack which will ultimately lead to the deaths of many people. The author has once again showed our "collective unconscious".
Goodheart throughout the essay follows a chronological pattern in his writing. His use of the anaphora "before the fire, before the ash, before the bodies" shows his respect for the word "before" which displays the importance of time. He wants the audience to acknowledge that the old times have passed and a new period has come where there are advancements of all kind. These advancements cause ignorance because it is impossible to be capable of knowing all specifics of every subject. This is why we now have people who specialize in one topic and study it to a great detail. Although we have specialists, we now have a fragile spot in our civilization because a person may be a lawyer and extensively know about traffic court but on the other hand could not tell you a thing about civil court cases. The author employs that advancements carry the cede of destruction.
Chris Woiwode
ReplyDeleteIn Adam Goodheart’s 9.11.01: The Skyscraper and the Airplane there are many rhetorical devices used to suggest and support the point that modernity brings with it death, destruction and fragility. The devices include personification, metaphor, metonym and allusion. Each help prove the point in their own way: personification helps us relate and shows the possibility of death, metonym and metaphor compare to show fragility, and allusion is used to reinforce.
The author employs metaphor to compare technology to people and convey their fragility. For example, “two man made behemoths joined in a fatal kiss,” brings forth the idea of death. Using the word ‘fatal’ makes the point in this quote because fatal suggests fate, and fate suggests death. Also in the quote, “the airplane and the skyscraper were born side by side,” using the word ‘born’ associates the idea of fragility with youth.
Goodheart personifies the two technologic giants, again, in order to convey the idea of fragility. In the same quote from before the author uses the word ‘born’ to personify the two machines so that we, as people, can relate to them. He also uses the word ‘kiss’ to personify them further. By personifying the objects he suggests death and fragility once more and associates the ideas to modernity.
The author uses allusion in The Skyscraper and the Airplane not only to give examples of modern technology’s fragility and destruction but also point out those who agree with him throughout history. For example, a quote from Carl Marx, “To be modern is to find ourselves in an environment that promises us adventure, power, joy, growth, transformation of ourselves and the world-and, at the same time, threatens to destroy everything we have, everything we know, everything we are.” This quote points out that for a person to be modern they are also fragile, they are also vulnerable.
Goodheart also incorporates simile to put forth his point about how modernity also forces fragility. By saying “For the first time, he explained, tall buildings were designed as vertebrates instead of crustaceans,” he points out the evolution of architecture and points out the ability to build more with less, which then makes the structure weak. Another simile that is employed is “When the earliest buildings to be called skyscrapers appeared, in the 1870s and 1880s, they sprang into shape so suddenly as to seem born in a single piece.” This simile not just further personifies the object, but also points out its fragility in another way. It makes the building of a skyscraper from that time seem like quick work and most people associate quick work with shoddy work at best, once again, hinting at the fragility of the structure.
Lastly, the author uses metonym to display his point. In the quotes, “Before the fire, before the ash, before the bodies tumbling solitary through space, one thin skin of metal and glass met another,” and, “Skyscraper and airplane: fragile containers for even-more-fragile flesh and blood,” the author employs metonyms to either personify or belittle the technological giants to make them seem fragile and human like. This continues to feed his point that modernity is immediately associated with fragility. Not just fragility of our own invention but the fragility of ourselves as well.
In Goodheart’s essay on 9/11, he explores the impact of the event on Americans in terms of modernity. Delving into the treacherous consequences of technological advancement, he describes the tragedy with a fatalistic approach. In meddling with the laws of physics, we should have seen its inevitability. He conveys our preoccupation that all is well in the world as a very ignorant one.
ReplyDeleteThe author uses irony, often in the form of paradoxes, to expose the fragility within modern society, a society that at the same time seems bent on pursuing inhuman levels of security. Irony is effective in expressing Goodheart’s central thesis that modernity accelerates our race into our most fundamental fears, because it serves as a snap back to reality from our preconceived notions of the world around us. He inquires into irony that even the most frequent flyers take each flight as a “near death” experience. The passengers’ mental stalemate between trusting the aircraft and fearing gravity only subsides when they return to land. It is almost impossible to justly feel safe in an airplane without knowing its technological intricacies, yet ironically enough, we find ourselves most in these types of institutions. by drilling an almost religious faith in that which we misunderstand the most, our society can live in bliss.
To advance the idea that our society lives in ignorance leaving the worrying to the specialists, Goodheart uses of apposition. He renames skyscrapers and airplanes as, “ fragile containers for even-more-fragile flesh and blood.” by explicitly explaining the treacherous nature of our modernity, he insinuates first that we need the explaination, and secondly the inevitable tragedy to come. “ the first truly revolutionary architectural innovation since the Romans invented the arch and the dome two millennia before,” is used to describe our societies ability to make cheap, high quality structural steel in order to further expose our lack of knowledge of the most prominent advancement of our society. By asserting that most of his audience lacks pertinent knowledge while exhibiting his through apposition, Goodheart conveys that his conclusions are credible.
You might think that with all these allegations of ignorance the author comes off as pompous, but he uses accumulation to create menacing lists of our society’s technological life support systems. Lists like, “electric lights and central heating, passenger elevators and fire escapes, telephones and flush toilets,” serve to reveal the never ending complexity that is modernity making our ignorance a justifiable one. And since the general public does not understand the inter-workings of our modern technologies, Goodheart points to our society’s need to specialize our professions. “Centrally managed electric and gas companies, sewer systems, water mains, fire departments, elevator inspectors, telephone operators, trash collectors,” hammer the point that the idea of being cognizant of even the most basic modern technologies is impossible.
Will Phillips
ReplyDeleteAP English Goodheart Essay
Adam Goodheart is able to use a variety of literary devices to improve his short stoy "The Skyscraper and the Airplane." Goodheart conveys to the reader the fragility and delicacy of the human life. He also addresses the trust that we haphazardly place in our modern technology, and the dangers associated with such. The author highlights the dynamics of the events of the 9/11 tragedy, the preceding events, and how we view them. The writer employs allusion, metaphor, irony and quotations into his work all to help illustate and reinforce his main themes of human fragility, vunerability, a sense of inevitability, and the unnaturality of modern techonological and architecturral advances.
Goodheart applies allusion to provide relatable examples throughout the short story in presenting the background history for planes, skyscrapers, and all those involved in their constructionas well as to emphasize the themes of inevitabilty and fatalism. The author alludes to the first ever flight, staged by the Wright brothers, by saying, “Just five years after the first scrawny aircraft left the ground at Kitty Hawk…” This gives us context and historical perspective. The use of the word scrawny ironically foreshadows the bulky and extravagant modern airplanes. Later, he mentions a short story by E. M. Forrester in which “Humans lived in huge structures composed of tiny, airless chambers…leaving them to travel in huge structures that criss-cross the globe.” Goodheart is attempting to establish that the creation of skyscrapers and airplanes was inevitable, but so too was their eventual collision. Additionally, he makes an allusion to the typical airline meals in stating, “The airline offers us a promise of sustenance; in eating, we accept.” In doing so, he indicates that we are given the meals as a token of trust from the airline and that we must accept. He also sheds light on the irony that airlines offer us sustenance of life yet possess the ability to take our lives and the responsibility not to do so.
Irony is another key part of Goodheart’s work as he uses it to express the bizarre natural incongruities in the ideas of the skyscraper, the airplane, and other creations of modernity and also to articulate the devistating impacts when these creations fail us. He varies its usage so that for a given instance irony could either lighten the mood or convey a devastating truth. Goodheart states, “…machines teach us…” which is ironic because we are the ones who are supposed to be “teaching” (or programming) machines. It scares humans to think that a machine possesses the ability to know, or do, what we cannot, and we find it alarmingly unnatural. Furthermore, the author says, “ the race to scrape the sky lifted off the ground”: a light use of irony intended for humor. Moreover, Goodheart speaks on the victims of the 9/11 tragedy calling them “so close together…so far from family and friends” Two utterly opposite ideas, moods, associations and connotations are brought together into a single sentence to emphasize the significance, danger, and impact of the situation and also to . Additionally, Goodheart is able to use irony to relay a profound truth with his statement that “The surest way not to fall is to stay on the ground.” He is saying that we must not dwell on the past event of destruction and must be willing to continue moving forward in technology, as well as in architecture, which is ironic in and of itself because of Goodheart's seemingly negative attitude toward technological advancements.
ReplyDeleteGoodheart is able, also, to take advantage of the use of metaphor to reiterate his ideas of fate, inevitability, and absurdity within the very idea of a skyscraper. He compares the metal and glass of the skyscraper and airplane to skin, giving it human characteristics and therefore signifying tenderness and an absense of the immortality with which we tend to view them, also subtly foreshadowing the "death" that it will experience. The author states, “…tall buildings were designed as vertebrates instead of crustaceans.” He provides the reader with an example for clarity and explanation. Additionally, he compares the World trade center “a pair of middle fingers, raised against the hostile vastness of the Atlantic Ocean.” The thought the middle finger instantly invokes a negative feeling in us because of what it represents. The author uses such an example to express a feeling of resentment toward the buildings and to provide insight into the perspect of other countries. Yet another metaphor used by the author is his comparison of the twin towers to “two mountains of trapped kinetic energy, perpetually poised at the brink of release.” He implies that the towers were always destined, waiting to fall, which brings about a deep sense of fear within us. Goodheart makes an ongoing metaphorical comparison between the airplane and the skyscraper throughout the short story as well.
Daniel Todesca
ReplyDeleteJanuary 24, 2012
Unlike many essays or passages about 9/11, Goodheart only briefly talks about terrorists or even how tragic and catastrophic the actual event was. Instead he shifts his main topic to the two objects that technically caused 9/11, the skyscraper and the airplane. In his essay, Goodheart uses many different sentence level strategies to cause different effects within the passage. Some of these strategies are metaphors, irony, and the use of colons.
One of the first appearances of metaphor is when he tells of a engineer describing that for the first time, tall buildings are built “as vertebrates instead of crustaceans.” The use of comparing two different biological animals gives almost a Darwinian aspect to the quote, stating that buildings are now evolving. To say that buildings, at the time of the quote, were evolving implies that they are changing for the better. Goodheart, on the other hand, doesn’t agree with this notion at all. He believes that we should be cautious of new technology and not just accept and trust it with your own life so readily just because people, like the engineer, say it’s how we, as human kind, are evolving. Tall buildings serve a purpose by making a lot of space because they build upward while still keeping the space occupied on the ground respectively minimal. Though buildings like skyscrapers, such as the World Trade Center, do much more than your average “tall” building. Skyscrapers are a way of showing technological progress, or a statement basically saying “look at us! We have evolved, and therefore we are better than you.” Early in his essay he states how the collision of the skyscraper and the airplane were “fated” or even “foreseen.”Goodheart describes that the twin towers were “like a pair of middle fingers, raised against the hostile vastness of the Atlantic.” This metaphor expresses Goodheart’s thoughts on how the skyscraper as a symbol of power and how the towers may have been taunting gesture all along and an attack was “fated” or bound to happen.
Goodheart’s essay as a whole was ironic within itself. The fact that an American was writing on a topic of a terrible recent tragedy and then turning around and basically saying it was bound to happen and we should have seen it coming is completely ironic. Other than the overall irony of the passage, Goodheart also used irony in small doses within his essay. At one point he writes “When Yamasaki created buildings on an unprecedented scale, he also created the potential for disaster on a unprecedented scale.” This is ironic because the concern of the entire project of building skyscrapers was to make something that has never been done before, to triumph over gravity, and to evolve into the future. No one thought to think that with the accomplishment of something so great and so “breath-taking”, there was an opportunity for a “breath-taking” catastrophe. He demonstrates the same idea when he writes “Every act of creation has its shadow double, a coequal act of destruction.”
A strategy frequently used through the essay is Goodheart’s use of the colon. He uses the colon to build up suspense within the sentence. Suspense is built up by only a few words followed by the colon. After the colon the ideas reflect upon the few words before the colon in a rapid fashion. It is almost like the crash between the airplane and the skyscraper. Like a plane the first few words come slow and un noticed, then the colon appears acting like the moment a on looker may begin to think to himself, “Hey, that plane seems to be heading dangerously toward that skyscraper,” and finally the last string of words is like the moment of the crash with many words and ideas all rapidly fired one after another.
Goodheart uses metaphors to compare the skyscraper and the airplane to normal things that we would consider fragile. The sentence “Each, (the skyscraper and the airplane) an artificial shell of our own creation,” compares the two inventions to a flimsy artificial shell, which we put our entire trust in nonetheless. He claims that they are “Tall buildings (that) were designed as vertebrates instead of crustaceans” to compare the skyscraper to something small and fragile and breaking down the idea and method behind the skyscraper into its simplest form. The skyscraper seems so complex because of its size, but this brings it down to the weak, understandable size of an insect. This all points back to the main idea of fragility in modern society. We put total trust into fragile objects that could malfunction at any second – just a cable broken, a wrong button pushed, or an incompetent pilot could send the entire thing down. It shows that our society is just as fragile as the things we put our trust in.
ReplyDeleteHe uses an allusion to bring in what we are possibly most afraid of. The human element. All airplanes require a pilot to operate them and this opens an entire new possibility of things going wrong. He alludes to a seminar held by American Airlines, in which employees of the airline tell them “Airplanes do not drop, dive, plummet, or fall.” He claims that we must “Surrender [ourselves]… to the wisdom and expertise of corporations, pilots, governments, engineers” , to show that not only do we have to trust the invention, but also the people who invented it and are operating it. He points out that we must trust “in the faceless engineers who built it, in the corporations that own and maintain it.” This causes us more fear because humans can’t get over the possibility of human error, and that no matter how hard we try, we can’t remove that possibility of human error from our inventions. We constantly worry over the simplest of things – will he make it on time, did he take out the trash, did he feed the dogs – yet we will put our lives in the hands of total strangers. With this not only is he pointing to the fragility of modern society, but also to our over-dependence on technology. We are willing to trust a machine but the second a human is involved we can’t take it. We want our technology to do everything, including taking the place of the human. We won’t be satisfied until machines are able to think for as well.
Goodheart employs irony to show the insecurity of the inventions and the trust we must put in our technology. He claims that “we create structures to shelter ourselves, yet in building them, we set ourselves at risk,” which points to people taking a risk with their lives by entering the structures of modernity. He states that “[People] entrust their lives, on a daily basis, to technologies whose inner workings remained a mystery” to illustrate that we put our lives into the hands of objects that we know nothing about – how it flies, how the engines operate, how the steering works. We know nothing about the operating or potential failings of the airplane yet we will risk everything when we enter it. We don’t want to know about the potential problems of the airplane, because that might scare us. It proves that ignorance is bliss. He uses the architect of the World Trade Center being “afraid of heights” to show that not even the man who was making the skyscraper and knew how it operated, was secure while in it. We all have these fears, but just like him we must swallow our fears in order to cross the plain into the skyscraper. In order to trust these things, we must ignore everything that makes them dangerous.