Forms of appeal

Logos

“Digging in the Trash” includes a few logical arguments that suggest Joy’s appealing to reason.

One example is when he explains why some people cannot relate to or understand the actions of people living in poverty: “They don’t understand what would make a man drink like my grandfather. The reason they can’t understand it is because they’ve never been that low. When all you’ve got is a twenty-dollar bill…” (ll. 190-195).

Another example of logos is when David Joy explains his grandfather’s apparent irrational behavior when returning to a woman who shot him:

In the end, he didn’t kill her, and deep down it’s because in some incomprehensible way he loved her. One of his deepest truths was that he was a horrible alcoholic and he knew how bad he was without her. (ll. 45-50)

Logical reasoning is also used when Joy talks about Paco going to war and returning home to kill his family. The implied logical conclusion is that war changed Paco and, by extension, that someone’s environment can have a powerful effect on them:

I don’t know what all Paco saw on the front lines of combat or how it affected him. But what I do know is that when he came home, one day he walked into his house, shot his brother, shot his father, and killed himself. (ll. 244-250)

Finally, the writer’s final comments are also a form of logical reasoning as he argues that poor people would survive a societal breakdown because they are used to surviving: “While all the privileged have been coasting through life so often o...