TOW #3: "Tuesday, And After"

                Featured in The New Yorker just two weeks after the 9/11 attacks, “Tuesday, and After” was written by The New Yorker staff, including contributions from John Updike, Jonathan Franzen, Denis Johnson, Roger Angell, Aharon Appelfeld, Rebecca Mead, Susan Sontag, Amitav Ghosh, and Donald Antrim. In the piece, the various author’s shared their own experience of the attack, and their observations on how the country should move on from that terrible day. At the time, all of America was teeming with questions and looking to someone for an answer. People were afraid and they didn’t know what permanent effects 9/11 would have on their lives and their country’s future. In an attempt to answer these questions and pose a few of their own, the author’s recount the event with intensely vivid imagery.  One contributor, John Updike, recounts the event by saying, “It seemed, at that first glance, more curious than horrendous: smoke speckled with bits of paper curled into the cloudless sky, and strange inky rivulets ran down the giant structure’s vertically corrugated surface […] As we watched the second tower burst into ballooning flame […] persisted the notion that, as on television, this was not quite real; it could be fixed; the technocracy the towers symbolized would find a way to put out the fire and reverse the damage” (Updike). By including such powerful metaphors and painstaking description, the authors are able to bring to life exactly what happened, and, in doing so, are able to sway the reader using ethos and pathos to listen to their opinion. Another author, Johnathan Franzen, used juxtaposition in his writing to give America some perspective on the terrorists who led the attack. He states, “Perhaps some of these glad artists were hiding in ruined Afghanistan, where the average life expectancy is barely forty. In that world you can’t walk through a bazaar without seeing men and children who are missing limbs” (Franzen). His inclusion of two different worlds in his explanation of what happened help to make sense of the event. As a piece intended both to comfort the American people as well as prompt them to think towards the future, “Tuesday, and After” was a very well written piece that the nation needed to read.