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Pathos
Definition of Satire
Satire is the use of humor, irony, sarcasm, or ridicule to criticize something or someone. Public figures, such as politicians, are often the subject of satire, but satirists can take... read full definition
Satire is the use of humor, irony, sarcasm, or ridicule to criticize something or someone. Public figures, such as politicians, are often the subject of... read full definition
Satire is the use of humor, irony, sarcasm, or ridicule to criticize something or someone. Public figures, such as politicians... read full definition
Satire
Explanation and Analysis—Thank You:
Mr. Pirzada satirizes the failings of the English language and U.S. culture by lamenting how often Americans say "thank you" when they don't mean it. Over dinner one night, he explains to Lilia his confusion about the expression:
“‘What is this thank-you? The lady at the bank thanks me, the cashier at the shop thanks me, the librarian thanks me as the tries to connect me to Dacca and fails. If I am buried in this country I will be thanked, no doubt, at my funeral.’”
Mr. Pirzada pokes fun at his own struggle to understand American conventions. In doing so, he criticizes its hollowness. His speech takes on a slightly morbid turn as he imagines his own funeral, and the hyperbolic speech points to something more troublesome than a purely lighthearted attempt at cultural initiation. “Thank you,” as Mr. Pirzada suggests, has become a catch-all for every circumstance, to the point where it crudely trivializes matters of death and suffering. Used for bank deposits, missed phone calls, and people in caskets, the phrase has lost its meaning.
Mr. Pirzada takes this logic to its absurd extremes in order to expose the problem beneath this twisted language. By muddling words and their contexts, Americans do injury with their ignorance. Superficial mannerisms fail to do justice to the gravity of the weight of lost lives, and neither will they resolve the geopolitical conflict. And yet, Americans can afford this linguistic sloppiness because they have been granted the luxury of obliviousness. Mr. Pirzada’s critique takes issue with the country’s easygoing detachment from global affairs.
The irony is that Mr. Pirzada ends up adopting the phrase himself. When Lilia receives his letter following his return to Pakistan, she notices that:
At the end of the letter he thanked us for our hospitality, adding that although he now understood the meaning of the words ‘thank you’ they still were not adequate to express his gratitude.
This moment is situationally ironic, as Mr. Pirzada uses the very phrase he satirized earlier in the story. His use of the phrase hints at his newfound familiarity with America, and in this context, it makes the story’s conclusion still more jarring. Colored by lazy bank tellers and librarians, “thank you” injects a faux-formality between him and Lilia’s family. In turn, his use of the phrase comes to signify his emotional removal and departure from Lilia and her family.
