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ambivalence , analysis , antithesis , cartoons , comics , devices , dialogismus , rhetoric , Sylvain Pongi

Rhetorical Devices and a Cartoon

Ever wonder how to analyze a comic using classical rhetoric?

What do you do when your comic seems to fit more than one device or figure?

Look no further….

This single-image comic is by Sylvain Pongi from France. It is captioned: “Think Different”; and represents a person with B’s inside his head who lives in a world made up of A’s.

As a whole, the image presents a rhetorical antithesis .

To successfully deliver its package of meanings, this cartoon depends upon two details held in balanced opposition: Red A’s dominate the background; blue Bs float inside the figure’s head.

At this juncture, we might say the rhetorical effect of the cartoon is best expressed by dialogismus, ­ the figure that ascribes thought to a character or that paraphrases a character’s thoughts.

More interesting here is the doubling of this rhetorical device. For dialogismus happens in two ways here, not merely in the obvious demonstration of a person’s thoughts reduced to a series of Bs. This is only the overt manifestation of dialogismus. There is another, an implied ascription of thought to the world around the figure.

The thought of the world appears in this comic summarized as a linear background script. That it is paraphrased to a series of A’s  makes sense, given the gist of the device to attempt to put thought into words without necessarily succeeding in so grand an enterprise and thus having recourse to a code. The summary of the world’s thoughts is mechanical, impersonal, initial, conformist, regularized, and strictly ruled. At the same time, every A also symbolizes a person who is thinking in this conventional way. Indeed, the A’s picture all those who collectively imagine the A’s they are expected to be thinking.

Seen with this implied ascription of thought in mind, linking the background A’s to unseen people thinking them, the cartoon evinces synecdoche : it compresses an array of personifications (wholes, voices) via their logocentric, typographic means for expression (parts, A’s & B’s, quoted voices). Thus, in a complicated way, the synecdoche of the comic collapses onto citation, both overt and concealed.

There is also a deep ambivalence in the comic. The person looks foolish. One eye is bigger than the other. The nose is out sized. If the comic is an assertion, telling us to think differently, it may also be asking us to risk looking foolish doing so. Or these clues of a person who is thinking with asymmetrical eyes in abecedarian demarcations of difference, defying outer codes to embrace an inner world of alternate if drifting B’s, is also a person who is socially demoted in the process somehow, as if to say beyond the cliched optimism of thinking outside of boxes, that being different is not always so alluring to look upon. Those who think in terms of true innovation, particularly in the sense that B follows A, are liable not to be too much to look at in the final analysis, or so the comic’s depictive ironies suggest, leaving us to look at an innovative thinker whose thinking leaves them marked by confusion and marginality.

In a way, the ambivalence of the comic’s details suggest it to be wary of its own cliched message.

Michael A. Chaney   &  Sara Biggs Chaney

P.S. Here’s a painted homage to the acoustic possibilities of the comic speech bubble and its powers of semiotic collapse.

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• Literary Terms
• Definition & Examples
• How to Use Antithesis

I. What is an Antithesis?

“Antithesis” literally means “opposite” – it is usually the opposite of a statement, concept, or idea. In literary analysis, an antithesis is a pair of statements or images in which the one reverses the other. The pair is written with similar grammatical structures to show more contrast. Antithesis (pronounced an-TITH-eh-sis) is used to emphasize a concept, idea, or conclusion.

II. Examples of Antithesis

That’s one small step for a man – one giant leap for mankind .  (Neil Armstrong, 1969)

In this example, Armstrong is referring to man walking on the moon. Although taking a step is an ordinary activity for most people, taking a step on the moon, in outer space, is a major achievement for all humanity.

To err is human ; to forgive , divine . (Alexander Pope)

This example is used to point out that humans possess both worldly and godly qualities; they can all make mistakes, but they also have the power to free others from blame.

The world will little note , nor long remember , what we say here, but it can never forget what they did  (Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address )

In his speech, Lincoln points out that the details of that moment may not be memorable, but the actions would make history, and therefore, never entirely forgotten.

Antithesis can be a little tricky to see at first. To start, notice how each of these examples is separated into two parts . The parts are separated either by a dash, a semicolon, or the word “but.” Antithesis always has this multi-part structure (usually there are two parts, but sometimes it can be more, as we’ll see in later examples). The parts are not always as obvious as they are in these examples, but they will always be there.

Next, notice how the second part of each example contains terms that reverse or invert terms in the first part: small step vs. giant leap; human vs. divine; we say vs. they do. In each of the examples, there are several pairs of contrasted terms between the first part and the second, which is quite common in antithesis.

Finally, notice that each of the examples contains some parallel structures and ideas in addition to the opposites. This is key! The two parts are not simply contradictory statements. They are a matched pair that have many grammatical structures or concepts in common; in the details, however, they are opposites.

For example, look at the parallel grammar of Example 1: the word “one,” followed by an adjective, a noun, and then the word “for.” This accentuates the opposites by setting them against a backdrop of sameness – in other words, two very different ideas are being expressed with very, very similar grammatical structures.

To recap: antithesis has three things:

• Two or more parts
• Reversed or inverted ideas
• (usually) parallel grammatical structure

III. The Importance of Verisimilitude

Antithesis is basically a complex form of juxtaposition . So its effects are fairly similar – by contrasting one thing against its opposite, a writer or speaker can emphasize the key attributes of whatever they’re talking about. In the Neil Armstrong quote, for example, the tremendous significance of the first step on the moon is made more vivid by contrasting it with the smallness and ordinariness of the motion that brought it about.

Antithesis can also be used to express curious contradictions or paradoxes. Again, the Neil Armstrong quote is a good example: Armstrong is inviting his listeners to puzzle over the fact that a tiny, ordinary step – not so different from the millions of steps we take each day – can represent so massive a technological accomplishment as the moon landing.

Paradoxically, an antithesis can also be used to show how two seeming opposites might in fact be similar.

IV. Examples of Verisimilitude in Literature

(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({}); Forgive us this day our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us . (The Lord’s Prayer)

The antithesis is doing a lot of work here. First, it shows the parallel between committing an evil act and being the victim of one. On the surface, these are opposites, and this is part of the antithesis, but at the same time they are, in the end, the same act from different perspectives. This part of the antithesis is basically just an expression of the Golden Rule.

Second, the antithesis displays a parallel between the speaker (a human) and the one being spoken to (God). The prayer is a request for divine mercy, and at the same time a reminder that human beings should also be merciful.

All the joy the world contains has come through wanting happiness for others . All the misery the world contains has come through wanting pleasure for yourself . (Shantideva, The Way of the Bodhisattva )

The antithesis here comes with some pretty intense parallel structure. Most of the words in each sentence are exactly the same as those in the other sentence. (“All the ___ the world contains has come through wanting ____ for ____.”) This close parallel structure makes the antithesis all the more striking, since the words that differ become much more visible.

Another interesting feature of this antithesis is that it makes “pleasure” and “happiness” seem like opposites, when most of us might think of them as more or less synonymous. The quote makes happiness seem noble and exalted, whereas pleasure is portrayed as selfish and worthless.

The proper function of man is to live , not to exist . I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong  (Jack London, Credo )

The opening antithesis here gets its punch from the fact that we think of living and existing as pretty similar terms. But for London, they are opposites. Living is about having vivid experiences, learning, and being bold; simply existing is a dull, pointless thing. These two apparently similar words are used in this antithesis to emphasize the importance of living as opposed to mere existing.

The second antithesis, on the other hand, is just the opposite – in this case, London is taking two words that seem somewhat opposed (waste and prolong), and telling us that they are in fact the same . Prolonging something is making it last; wasting something is letting it run out too soon. But, says London, when it comes to life, they are the same. If you try too hard to prolong your days (that is, if you’re so worried about dying that you never face your fears and live your life), then you will end up wasting them because you will never do anything worthwhile.

V. Examples of Verisimilitude in Pop Culture

Everybody doesn’t like something, but nobody doesn’t like Sara Lee. (Sara Lee pastry advertisement)

This classic ad uses antithesis to set up a deliberate grammatical error. This is a common technique in advertising, since people are more likely to remember a slogan that is grammatically incorrect. (Even if they only remember it because they found it irritating, it still sticks in their brain, which is all that an ad needs to do.) The antithesis helps make the meaning clear, and throws the grammatical error into sharper relief.

What men must know , a boy must learn . (The Lookouts)

Here’s another example of how parallel structure can turn into antithesis fairly easily. (The structure is noun-“must”-verb. ) The antithesis also expresses the basic narrative of The Lookouts , which is all about kids learning to fend for themselves and become full-fledged adults.

Shut Your Mouth and Open Your Eyes (the band “AFI” – album title)

The antithesis here is a juxtaposition of two different actions (opening and shutting) that are actually part of the same sort of behavior – the behavior of somebody who wants to understand the world rather than be the center of attention. It’s basically a restatement of the old adage that “those who speak the most often have the least to say.”

VI. Related Terms

• Juxtaposition

Antithesis is basically a form of juxtaposition . Juxtaposition, though, is a much broader device that encompasses any deliberate use of contrast or contradiction by an author. So, in addition to antithesis, it might include:

• The scene in “The Godfather” where a series of brutal murders is intercut with shots of a baptism, juxtaposing birth and death.
• “A Song of Ice and Fire” (George R. R. Martin book series)
• Heaven and Hell
• Mountains and the sea
• Dead or alive
• “In sickness and in health”

Antithesis performs a very similar function, but does so in a more complicated way by using full sentences (rather than single words or images) to express the two halves of the juxtaposition.

Here is an antithesis built around some of the common expressions from above

• “ Sheep go to Heaven ; goats go to Hell .”
• “Beethoven’s music is as mighty as the mountains and as timeless as the sea .”
• “In sickness he loved me; in health he abandoned ”

Notice how the antithesis builds an entire statement around the much simpler juxtaposition. And, crucially, notice that each of those statements exhibits parallel grammatical structure . In this way, both Juxtaposition and parallel structures can be used to transform a simple comparison, into antithesis.

List of Terms

• Alliteration
• Amplification
• Anachronism
• Anthropomorphism
• Antonomasia
• APA Citation
• Aposiopesis
• Autobiography
• Bildungsroman
• Characterization
• Circumlocution
• Cliffhanger
• Comic Relief
• Connotation
• Deus ex machina
• Deuteragonist
• Doppelganger
• Double Entendre
• Dramatic irony
• Equivocation
• Extended Metaphor
• Figures of Speech
• Flash-forward
• Foreshadowing
• Intertextuality
• Literary Device
• Malapropism
• Onomatopoeia
• Parallelism
• Pathetic Fallacy
• Personification
• Point of View
• Polysyndeton
• Protagonist
• Red Herring
• Rhetorical Device
• Rhetorical Question
• Science Fiction
• Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
• Synesthesia
• Turning Point
• Understatement
• Urban Legend
• Verisimilitude
• Essay Guide
• Cite This Website

Definition of Antithesis

Antithesis is a literary device that refers to the juxtaposition of two opposing elements through the parallel grammatical structure. The word antithesis, meaning absolute opposite, is derived from Greek for “ setting opposite,” indicating when something or someone is in direct contrast or the obverse of another thing or person.

Antithesis is an effective literary and rhetorical device , as it pairs exact opposite or contrasting ideas by utilizing the parallel grammatical structure. This helps readers and audience members define concepts through contrast and develop an understanding of something through defining its opposite. In addition, through the use of parallelism , antithesis establishes a repetitive structure that makes for rhythmic writing and lyrical speech.

For example, Alexander Pope states in  An Essay on Criticism , “ To err is human ; to forgive divine.” Pope’s use of antithesis reflects the impact of this figure of speech in writing, as it creates a clear, memorable, and lyrical effect for the reader. In addition, Pope sets human error in contrast to divine forgiveness, allowing readers to understand that it is natural for people to make mistakes, and therefore worthy for others to absolve them when they do.

Examples of Antithesis in Everyday Speech

Antithesis is often used in everyday speech as a means of conveying opposing ideas in a concise and expressive way. Since antithesis is intended to be a figure of speech, such statements are not meant to be understood in a literal manner. Here are some examples of antithesis used in everyday speech:

• Go big or go home.
• Spicy food is heaven on the tongue but hell in the tummy.
• Those who can, do; those who can’t do, teach.
• Get busy living or get busy dying.
• Speech is silver but silence is gold.
• No pain, no gain.
• It’s not a show, friends; it’s show business.
• No guts, no glory.
• A moment on the lips; a lifetime on the hips.
• If you fail to plan, then you plan to fail.

Common Examples of Antithesis from Famous Speeches

Antithesis can be an effective rhetorical device in terms of calling attention to drastic differences between opposing ideas and concepts. By highlighting the contrast side-by-side with the exact same structure, the speaker is able to impact an audience in a memorable and significant way. Here are some common examples of antithesis from famous speeches:

• “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character .” (Martin Luther King, Jr. “I Have a Dream”)
• “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” (Abraham Lincoln “The Gettysburg Address”)
• “‘Some men see things as they are and say why. I dream things that never were and say why not.'” (Edward Kennedy quoting Robert F. Kennedy during eulogy )
• “We observe today not a victory of party, but a celebration of freedom, symbolizing an end as well as a beginning, signifying renewal as well as change.” (John F. Kennedy “Presidential Inaugural Speech”)
• “You see, for any champion to succeed, he must have a team — a very incredible, special team; people that he can depend on, count on, and rely upon through everything — the highs and lows, the wins and losses, the victories and failures, and even the joys and heartaches that happen both on and off the court.” (Michael Chang “ Induction Speech for Tennis Hall of Fame”)

Examples of Proverbs Featuring Antithesis

Proverbs are simple and often traditional sayings that express insight into truths that are perceived, based on common sense or experience. These sayings are typically intended to be metaphorical and therefore rely on figures of speech such as antithesis. Proverbs that utilize antithetical parallelism feature an antithesis to bring together opposing ideas in defined contrast. Therefore, antithesis is effective as a literary device in proverbs by allowing the reader to consider one idea and then it’s opposite. It also makes for lyrical and easily remembered sayings.

Here are some examples of proverbs featuring antithesis:

• Cleanliness is next to godliness.
• Beggars can’t be choosers.
• Easy come, easy go.
• Hope for the best; prepare for the worst.
• Keep your friends close; keep your enemies closer.
• Like father, like son.
• Where there’s smoke, there’s fire.
• An ounce of protection is worth a pound of cure.
• Be slow in choosing, but slower in changing.
• Give them an inch and they’ll take a mile.
• If you can’t beat them, join them.
• Keep your mouth closed and your eyes open.
• One man’s junk is another man’s treasure.
• Out of sight, out of mind.
• Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

Utilizing Antithesis in Writing

As a literary device, antithesis allows authors to add contrast to their writing. This is effective in terms of comparing two contrasting ideas, such as a character’s conflicting emotions or a setting’s opposing elements. In literature, antithesis doesn’t require a pairing of exact opposites, but rather concepts that are different and distinct. In addition, since antithesis creates a lyrical quality to writing through parallel structure , the rhythm of phrasing and wording should be as similar as possible. Like most literary and rhetorical devices, overuse of antithesis will create confusion or invoke boredom in a reader as well as make the writing seem forced.

Antithesis and Parallelism

Both terms demonstrate a fundamental difference. An antithesis comprises two contradictory ideas and parallelism does not necessarily comprise opposite ideas or persons. It could have more than two ideas or persons. As the name suggests that parallelism is a condition where is an antithesis is an opposition. For example, man proposes, God disposes, has two contradictory ideas. However, it is also a parallel sentence . Furthermore, parallelism occurs mostly in structure and less in ideas. Even similar ideas could occur in parallelism, while an antithesis has only dissimilar ideas.

Antithesis and Juxtaposition

As far as juxtaposition is concerned, it means placing two ideas together that are dissimilar. They need not be opposite to each other. In the case of antithesis, they must be opposite to each other as in the case of man proposes, God disposes. Not only these two ideas are dissimilar, but also they are opposite. In the case of juxtaposition, a poet only puts two ideas together and they are not opposed to each other.

Use of Antithesis in Sentences  

• As soon he dies, he becomes a dead living.
• Most people do not understand the value of money when the poor put money ahead of them.
• Some people make money, while some waste it.
• Although they have gone leaps ahead, they have also stepped back just in the nick of time.
• The public comes forward when there is prosperity and moves back when there is adversity.

Examples of Antithesis in Literature

Antithesis is an effective literary device and figure of speech in which a writer intentionally juxtaposes two contrasting ideas or entities. Antithesis is typically achieved through parallel structure, in which opposing concepts or elements are paired in adjacent phrases , clauses , or sentences. This draws the reader’s attention to the significance or importance of the agents being contrasted, thereby adding a memorable and meaningful quality to the literary work.

Here are some examples of antithesis in well-known works of literature:

Example 1:  Hamlet (William Shakespeare)

Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice ; Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment.

In Shakespeare’s well-known play , he utilizes antithesis as a literary device for Polonius to deliver fatherly advice to his son before Laertes leaves for France. In these lines, Polonius pairs contrasting ideas such as listening and speaking using parallel structure. This adds a lyrical element to the wording, in addition to having a memorable and foreboding impact on the characters and audience members with the meaning of each line.

Despite the attempt by Polonius to impart logical thinking, measured response, and wise counsel to his son through antithesis, Laertes becomes so fixated on avenging his father’s death that his actions are impulsive and imprudent. Polonius’s antithetical words are not heeded by his son, resulting in the death of several characters including Hamlet and Laertes himself.

Example 2:  Paradise Lost  (John Milton)

Here at least We shall be free; the Almighty hath not built Here for his envy, will not drive us hence: Here we may reign secure, and in my choice To reign is worth ambition though in Hell: Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven.

In Milton’s epic poem , he explores the Fall of Satan as well as the temptation and subsequent Fall of Man. This passage is spoken by Satan after he has been condemned to Hell by God for attempting to assume power and authority in Heaven. Satan is unrepentant of his actions, and wants to persuade his followers that Hell is preferable to Heaven.

Satan utilizes antithesis in the last line of this passage to encourage his rebellious followers to understand that, in Hell, they are free and rule their own destiny. In this line, Milton contrasts not just the ideas of Hell and Heaven, but also of reign and servitude as concepts applied to the angels , respectively. Pairing these opposites by using this literary device has two effects for the reader. First, Satan’s claim foreshadows his ability to use his words describing independence to tempt Eve, resulting in her and Adam’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Second, this antithesis invites the reader to consider Satan’s thought-process and experience to gain a deeper understanding of his motives in the poem.

Example 3:  Fire and Ice  (Robert Frost)

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice. From what I’ve tasted of desire I hold with those who favor fire. But if it had to perish twice, I think I know enough of hate To say that for destruction ice Is also great And would suffice.

In his poem, Frost utilizes antithesis to contrast fire and ice as elements with devastating and catastrophic potential to end the world. Frost effectively demonstrates the equal powers for the destruction of these elements, despite showcasing them as opposing forces. In this case, the poet’s antithesis has a literal as well as figurative interpretation. As the poem indicates, the world could literally end in the fire as well as ice. However, fire and ice are contrasting symbols in the poem as well. Fire represents “desire,” most likely in the form of greed, the corruption of power, domination, and control. Conversely, ice represents “hate” in the form of prejudice, oppression, neglect, and isolation.

The presence of antithesis in the poem is effective for readers in that it evokes contrasting and powerful imagery of fire and ice as opposing yet physically destructive forces. In addition, the human characteristics associated with fire and ice, and what they represent as psychologically and socially destructive symbols, impact the reader in a powerful and memorable way as well. Antithesis elevates for the reader the understanding that the source of the end of the world may not be natural causes but rather human action or behavior; and that the end of the world may not be simply the destruction of the earth, but rather the destruction of humankind.

Example 4: The Gettysburg Address by Abraham Lincoln

We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives so that nation might live.

The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract.

The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.

These three examples from the address of Abraham Lincoln show the use of contradictory ideas put together in one sentence. They show how he mentions living and dead putting them side by side. This antithesis has helped Lincoln as well as America to come out of the ravages of the Civil War.

Function of Antithesis

An antithesis helps make an idea distinct and prominent when it contradicts another idea in the first part of the argument . This contrastive feature helps make readers make their argument solid, cogent, and eloquent. Sentences comprising anthesis also become easy to remember, quote, and recall when required. When an antithesis occurs in a text, it creates an argumentative atmosphere where a dialectic could take place and helps writers and speakers hook their audience easily with antithetical statements.

Synonyms of Antithesis

Antithesis has no exact synonyms but several words come closer in meanings such as opposite, reverse, converse, reversal, inverse, extreme, another side of the coin, or flip side or contrast.

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Antithesis Definition

What is antithesis? Here’s a quick and simple definition:

Antithesis is a figure of speech that juxtaposes two contrasting or opposing ideas, usually within parallel grammatical structures. For instance, Neil Armstrong used antithesis when he stepped onto the surface of the moon in 1969 and said, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind." This is an example of antithesis because the two halves of the sentence mirror each other in grammatical structure, while together the two halves emphasize the incredible contrast between the individual experience of taking an ordinary step, and the extraordinary progress that Armstrong's step symbolized for the human race.

Some additional key details about antithesis:

• Antithesis works best when it is used in conjunction with parallelism (successive phrases that use the same grammatical structure), since the repetition of structure makes the contrast of the content of the phrases as clear as possible.
• The word "antithesis" has another meaning, which is to describe something as being the opposite of another thing. For example, "love is the antithesis of selfishness." This guide focuses only on antithesis as a literary device.
• The word antithesis has its origins in the Greek word antithenai , meaning "to oppose." The plural of antithesis is antitheses.

How to Pronounce Antithesis

Here's how to pronounce antithesis: an- tith -uh-sis

Antithesis and Parallelism

Often, but not always, antithesis works in tandem with parallelism . In parallelism, two components of a sentence (or pair of sentences) mirror one another by repeating grammatical elements. The following is a good example of both antithesis and parallelism:

To err is human , to forgive divine .

The two clauses of the sentence are parallel because each starts off with an infinitive verb and ends with an adjective ("human" and "divine"). The mirroring of these elements then works to emphasize the contrast in their content, particularly in the very strong opposite contrast between "human" and "divine."

Antithesis Without Parallelism

In most cases, antitheses involve parallel elements of the sentence—whether a pair of nouns, verbs, adjectives, or other grammar elements. However, it is also possible to have antithesis without such clear cut parallelism. In the Temptations Song "My Girl," the singer uses antithesis when he says:

"When it's cold outside , I've got the month of May ."

Here the sentence is clearly cut into two clauses on either side of the comma, and the contrasting elements are clear enough. However, strictly speaking there isn't true parallelism here because "cold outside" and "month of May" are different types of grammatical structures (an adjective phrase and a noun phrase, respectively).

Antithesis vs. Related Terms

Three literary terms that are often mistakenly used in the place of antithesis are juxtaposition , oxymoron , and foil . Each of these three terms does have to do with establishing a relationship of difference between two ideas or characters in a text, but beyond that there are significant differences between them.

Antithesis vs. Juxtaposition

In juxtaposition , two things or ideas are placed next to one another to draw attention to their differences or similarities. In juxtaposition, the pairing of two ideas is therefore not necessarily done to create a relationship of opposition or contradiction between them, as is the case with antithesis. So, while antithesis could be a type of juxtaposition, juxtaposition is not always antithesis.

Antithesis vs. Oxymoron

In an oxymoron , two seemingly contradictory words are placed together because their unlikely combination reveals a deeper truth. Some examples of oxymorons include:

• Sweet sorrow
• Cruel kindness
• Living dead

The focus of antithesis is opposites rather than contradictions . While the words involved in oxymorons seem like they don't belong together (until you give them deeper thought), the words or ideas of antithesis do feel like they belong together even as they contrast as opposites. Further, antitheses seldom function by placing the two words or ideas right next to one another, so antitheses are usually made up of more than two words (as in, "I'd rather be among the living than among the dead").

Antithesis vs. Foil

Some Internet sources use "antithesis" to describe an author's decision to create two characters in a story that are direct opposites of one another—for instance, the protagonist and antagonist . But the correct term for this kind of opposition is a foil : a person or thing in a work of literature that contrasts with another thing in order to call attention to its qualities. While the sentence "the hare was fast, and the tortoise was slow" is an example of antithesis, if we step back and look at the story as a whole, the better term to describe the relationship between the characters of the tortoise and the hare is "foil," as in, "The character of the hare is a foil of the tortoise."

Antithesis Examples

Antithesis in literature.

Below are examples of antithesis from some of English literature's most acclaimed writers — and a comic book!

Antithesis in Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities

In the famous opening lines of A Tale of Two Cities , Dickens sets out a flowing list of antitheses punctuated by the repetition of the word "it was" at the beginning of each clause (which is itself an example of the figure of speech anaphora ). By building up this list of contrasts, Dickens sets the scene of the French Revolution that will serve as the setting of his tale by emphasizing the division and confusion of the era. The overwhelming accumulation of antitheses is also purposefully overdone; Dickens is using hyperbole to make fun of the "noisiest authorities" of the day and their exaggerated claims. The passage contains many examples of antithesis, each consisting of one pair of contrasting ideas that we've highlighted to make the structure clearer.

It was the best of times , it was the worst of times , it was the age of wisdom , it was the age of foolishness , it was the epoch of belief , it was the epoch of incredulity , it was the season of Light , it was the season of Darkness , it was the spring of hope , it was the winter of despair , we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven , we were all going direct the other way —in short, the period was so far like the present period, that some of its noisiest authorities insisted on its being received, for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only.

Antithesis in John Milton's Paradise Lost

In this verse from Paradise Lost , Milton's anti-hero , Satan, claims he's happier as the king of Hell than he could ever have been as a servant in Heaven. He justifies his rebellion against God with this pithy phrase, and the antithesis drives home the double contrast between Hell and Heaven, and between ruling and serving.

Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.

Antithesis in William Shakespeare's Othello

As the plot of Othello nears its climax , the antagonist of the play, Iago, pauses for a moment to acknowledge the significance of what is about to happen. Iago uses antithesis to contrast the two opposite potential outcomes of his villainous plot: either events will transpire in Iago's favor and he will come out on top, or his treachery will be discovered, ruining him.

This is the night That either makes me or fordoes me quite .

In this passage, the simple word "either" functions as a cue for the reader to expect some form of parallelism, because the "either" signals that a contrast between two things is coming.

Antithesis in William Shakespeare's Hamlet

Shakespeare's plays are full of antithesis, and so is Hamlet's most well-known "To be or not to be" soliloquy . This excerpt of the soliloquy is a good example of an antithesis that is not limited to a single word or short phrase. The first instance of antithesis here, where Hamlet announces the guiding question (" to be or not to be ") is followed by an elaboration of each idea ("to be" and "not to be") into metaphors that then form their own antithesis. Both instances of antithesis hinge on an " or " that divides the two contrasting options.

To be or not to be , that is the question: Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them ...

Antithesis in T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets"

In this excerpt from his poem "Four Quartets," T.S. Eliot uses antithesis to describe the cycle of life, which is continuously passing from beginning to end, from rise to fall, and from old to new.

In my beginning is my end . In succession Houses rise and fall , crumble, are extended, Are removed, destroyed, restored, or in their place Is an open field, or a factory, or a by-pass. Old stone to new building , old timber to new fires ...

Antithesis in Green Lantern's Oath

Comic book writers know the power of antithesis too! In this catchy oath, Green Lantern uses antithesis to emphasize that his mission to defeat evil will endure no matter the conditions.

In brightest day , in blackest night , No evil shall escape my sight. Let those who worship evil's might Beware my power—Green lantern's light!

While most instances of antithesis are built around an "or" that signals the contrast between the two parts of the sentence, the Green Lantern oath works a bit differently. It's built around an implied "and" (to be technical, that first line of the oath is an asyndeton that replaces the "and" with a comma), because members of the Green Lantern corps are expressing their willingness to fight evil in all places, even very opposite environments.

Antithesis in Speeches

Many well-known speeches contain examples of antithesis. Speakers use antithesis to drive home the stakes of what they are saying, sometimes by contrasting two distinct visions of the future.

Antithesis in Patrick Henry's Speech to the Second Virginia Convention, 1775

This speech by famous American patriot Patrick Henry includes one of the most memorable and oft-quoted phrases from the era of the American Revolution. Here, Henry uses antithesis to emphasize just how highly he prizes liberty, and how deadly serious he is about his fight to achieve it.

Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take: but as for me, give me liberty or give me death .

Antithesis in Martin Luther King Jr.'s Oberlin Commencement Address

In this speech by one of America's most well-known orators, antithesis allows Martin Luther King Jr. to highlight the contrast between two visions of the future; in the first vision, humans rise above their differences to cooperate with one another, while in the other humanity is doomed by infighting and division.

We must all learn to live together as brothers —or we will all perish together as fools .

Antithesis in Songs

In songs, contrasting two opposite ideas using antithesis can heighten the dramatic tension of a difficult decision, or express the singer's intense emotion—but whatever the context, antithesis is a useful tool for songwriters mainly because opposites are always easy to remember, so lyrics that use antithesis tend to stick in the head.

Antithesis in "Should I Stay or Should I Go" by The Clash (1981)

In this song by The Clash, the speaker is caught at a crossroads between two choices, and antithesis serves as the perfect tool to express just how confused and conflicted he is. The rhetorical question —whether to stay or to go—presents two opposing options, and the contrast between his lover's mood from one day (when everything is "fine") to the next (when it's all "black") explains the difficulty of his choice.

One day it's fine and next it's black So if you want me off your back Well, come on and let me know Should I stay or should I go ? Should I stay or should I go now? Should I stay or should I go now? If I go, there will be trouble If I stay it will be double ...

Antithesis in "My Girl" by the Temptations (1965)

In this song, the singer uses a pair of metaphors to describe the feeling of joy that his lover brings him. This joy is expressed through antithesis, since the singer uses the miserable weather of a cloudy, cold day as the setting for the sunshine-filled month of May that "his girl" makes him feel inside, emphasizing the power of his emotions by contrasting them with the bleak weather.

I've got sunshine on a cloudy day When it's cold outside I've got the month of May Well I guess you'd say, What can make me feel this way? My girl, my girl, my girl Talkin' bout my girl.

Why Do Writers Use Antithesis?

Fundamentally, writers of all types use antithesis for its ability to create a clear contrast. This contrast can serve a number of purposes, as shown in the examples above. It can:

• Present a stark choice between two alternatives.
• Convey magnitude or range (i.e. "in brightest day, in darkest night" or "from the highest mountain, to the deepest valley").
• Express strong emotions.
• Create a relationship of opposition between two separate ideas.
• Accentuate the qualities and characteristics of one thing by placing it in opposition to another.

Whatever the case, antithesis almost always has the added benefit of making language more memorable to listeners and readers. The use of parallelism and other simple grammatical constructions like "either/or" help to establish opposition between concepts—and opposites have a way of sticking in the memory.

Other Helpful Antithesis Resources

• The Wikipedia page on Antithesis : A useful summary with associated examples, along with an extensive account of antithesis in the Gospel of Matthew.
• Sound bites from history : A list of examples of antithesis in famous political speeches from United States history — with audio clips!
• A blog post on antithesis : This quick rundown of antithesis focuses on a quote you may know from Muhammad Ali's philosophy of boxing: "Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee."

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Antithesis (Grammar and Rhetoric)

Glossary of Grammatical and Rhetorical Terms

 Richard Nordquist

• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

Antithesis is a  rhetorical term for the juxtaposition of contrasting ideas in balanced phrases or clauses . Plural: antitheses . Adjective: antithetical .

In grammatical terms, antithetical statements are parallel structures . 

"A perfectly formed antithesis," says Jeanne Fahnestock, combines " isocolon , parison , and perhaps, in an inflected language, even homoeoteleuton ; it is an overdetermined figure . The aural patterning of the antithesis, its tightness and predictability, are critical to appreciating how the syntax of the figure can be used to force semantic opposites" ( Rhetorical Figures in Science , 1999).

From the Greek, "opposition"

Examples and Observations

• "Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing." (Goethe)
• "Everybody doesn't like something, but nobody doesn't like Sara Lee." (advertising slogan)
• "There are so many things that we wish we had done yesterday, so few that we feel like doing today." (Mignon McLaughlin, The Complete Neurotic's Notebook . Castle Books, 1981)
• "We notice things that don't work. We don't notice things that do. We notice computers, we don't notice pennies. We notice e-book readers, we don't notice books." (Douglas Adams, The Salmon of Doubt: Hitchhiking the Galaxy One Last Time . Macmillan, 2002)
• "Hillary has soldiered on, damned if she does, damned if she doesn't, like most powerful women, expected to be tough as nails and warm as toast at the same time." (Anna Quindlen, "Say Goodbye to the Virago." Newsweek , June 16, 2003)
• "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way." (Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities , 1859)
• "Tonight you voted for action, not politics as usual. You elected us to focus on your jobs, not ours." (President Barack Obama, election night victory speech, November 7, 2012)
• "You're easy on the eyes Hard on the heart." (Terri Clark)
• "We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools." (Martin Luther King, Jr., speech at St. Louis, 1964)
• "The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here." (Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address , 1863)
• "All the joy the world contains Has come through wishing happiness for others. All the misery the world contains Has come through wanting pleasure for oneself." (Shantideva)
• "The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression." (Harold Pinter, "Writing for the Theatre," 1962)
• "And let my liver rather heat with wine Than my heart cool with mortifying groans." (Gratiano in The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare)
• Jack London's Credo "I would rather be ashes than dust! I would rather that my spark should burn out in a brilliant blaze than it should be stifled by dryrot. I would rather be a superb meteor, every atom of me in magnificent glow, than a sleepy and permanent planet. The proper function of man is to live, not to exist. I shall not waste my days in trying to prolong them. I shall use my time." (Jack London, quoted by his literary executor, Irving Shepard, in an introduction to a 1956 collection of London's stories)
• Antithesis and Antitheton " Antithesis is the grammatical form of antitheton . Antitheton deals with contrasting thoughts or proofs in an argument ; Antithesis deals with contrasting words or ideas within a phrase, sentence, or paragraph." (Gregory T. Howard, Dictionary of Rhetorical Terms . Xlibris, 2010)
• Antithesis and Antonyms Antithesis as a figure of speech exploits the existence of many 'natural' opposites in the vocabularies of all languages. Small children filling in workbooks and adolescents studying for the antonyms section of the SAT learn to match words to their opposites and so absorb much vocabulary as pairs of opposed terms, connecting up to down and bitter to sweet, pusillanimous to courageous and ephemeral to everlasting. Calling these antonyms 'natural' simply means that pairs of words can have wide currency as opposites among users of a language outside any particular context of use. Word association tests give ample evidence of the consistent linking of opposites in verbal memory when subjects given one of a pair of antonyms most often respond with the other, 'hot' triggering 'cold' or 'long' retrieving 'short' (Miller 1991, 196). An antithesis as a figure of speech at the sentence level builds on these powerful natural pairs, the use of one in the first half of the figure creating the expectation of its verbal partner in the second half." (Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science . Oxford University Press, 1999)
• Antithesis in Films - "Since . . . the quality of a scene or image is more vividly shown when set beside its opposite, it is not surprising to find antithesis in film . . .. There is a cut in Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick) from the yellow flickers of a flaming house to a still gray courtyard, lined with soldiers, and another from the yellow candles and warm browns of a gambling room to the cool grays of a terrace by moonlight and the Countess of Lyndon in white." (N. Roy Clifton, The Figure in Film . Associated University Presses, 1983) "It is clear that in every simile there is present both differences and likenesses, and both are a part of its effect. By ignoring differences, we find a simile and may perhaps find an antithesis in the same event, by ignoring likeness. . . . - "In The Lady Eve (Preston Sturges), a passenger boards a liner by tender. This was conveyed by the two vessels' whistling. We see a convulsive spurt of water and hear a desperate, soundless puff before the siren of the tender found its voice. There was a stuttering amazement, a drunken incoordination to these elaborate preliminaries, foiled by the liner's lofty unruffled burst of sounding steam. Here things that are like, in place, in sound, and in function, are unexpectedly contrasted. The commentary lies in the differences and gains force from the likeness." (N. Roy Clifton, The Figure in Film . Associated University Presses, 1983)
• Antithetical Observations of Oscar Wilde - “When we are happy, we are always good, but when we are good, we are not always happy.” ( The Picture of Dorian Gray , 1891) - “We teach people how to remember, we never teach them how to grow.” ("The Critic as Artist," 1991) - “Wherever there is a man who exercises authority, there is a man who resists authority.” ( The Soul of Man Under Socialism , 1891) - “Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer.” ("The Critic as Artist," 1991)

Pronunciation: an-TITH-uh-sis

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Literary Devices

Literary devices, terms, and elements, definition of antithesis.

Antithesis is the use of contrasting concepts, words, or sentences within parallel grammatical structures. This combination of a balanced structure with opposite ideas serves to highlight the contrast between them. For example, the following famous Muhammad Ali quote is an example of antithesis: “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” This is an antithesis example because there is the contrast between the animals and their actions (the peaceful floating butterfly versus the aggressive stinging bee) combined with the parallel grammatical structure of similes indicated by “like a.” Ali is indicating the contrasting skills necessary to be a good boxer.

Difference Between Antithesis and Juxtaposition

Antithesis is very similar to juxtaposition, as juxtaposition also sets two different things close to each other to emphasize the difference between them. However, juxtaposition does not necessarily deal with completely opposite ideas—sometimes the juxtaposition may be between two similar things so that the reader will notice the subtle differences. Juxtaposition also does not necessitate a parallel grammatical structure. The definition of antithesis requires this balanced grammatical structure.

Common Examples of Antithesis

The use of antithesis is very popular in speeches and common idioms, as the inherent contrasts often make antithesis quite memorable. Here are some examples of antithesis from famous speeches:

• “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.
• “And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man.” –John F. Kennedy Jr.
• “We will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.” –Barack Obama
• “Decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all-powerful to be impotent.” –Winston Churchill
• “The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.” –Abraham Lincoln

Significance of Antithesis in Literature

Antithesis can be a helpful tool for the author both to show a character’s mindset and to set up an argument. If the antithesis is something that the character is thinking, the audience can better understand the full scope of that character’s thoughts. While antithesis is not the most ubiquitous of literary devices, some authors use antithesis quite extensively, such as William Shakespeare. Many of his sonnets and plays include examples of antithesis.

Examples of Antithesis in Literature

HAMLET: To be, or not to be, that is the question— Whether ’tis Nobler in the mind to suffer The Slings and Arrows of outrageous Fortune, Or to take Arms against a Sea of troubles, And by opposing, end them?

( Hamlet by William Shakespeare)

Arguably the most famous six words in all of Shakespeare’s work are an example of antithesis. Hamlet considers the important question of “to be, or not to be.” In this line, he is considering the very nature of existence itself. Though the line is quite simple in form it contrasts these very important opposite states. Hamlet sets up his soliloquy with this antithesis and continues with others, including the contrast between suffering whatever fortune has to offer or opposing his troubles. This is a good example of Shakespeare using antithesis to present to the audience or readers Hamlet’s inner life and the range of his thinking.

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way…

( A Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens)

The opening paragraph of Charles Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities employs many different literary devices all at once. There are many examples of antithesis back-to-back, starting with the first contrast between “the best of times” and “the worst of times.” Each pair of contrasting opposites uses a parallel structure to emphasize their differences. Dickens uses these antithetical pairs to show what a tumultuous time it was during the setting of his book. In this case, the use of antithesis is a rhetorical device that foreshadows the conflicts that will be central to the novel.

There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one’s own safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn’t have to; but if he didn’t want to he was sane and had to. Yossarian was moved very deeply by the absolute simplicity of this clause of Catch-22 and let out a respectful whistle.

( Catch-22 by Joseph Heller)

In Joseph Heller’s classic anti-war novel Catch-22 , Heller uses a specific type of humor in which antithetical statements show the true absurdity of war. This very famous quote explains the concept of the “Catch-22,” which became a popular idiomatic expression because of the book. In fact, this example is not so much an antithetical statement but instead an antithetical situation. That is to say, the two possible outcomes for Orr are opposite: either he’s deemed crazy and would thus not be forced to fly any more combat missions, or he’s sane and then would indeed have to fly them. However, the one situation negates the possibility of the other, as only a sane man would be clear-headed enough to ask not to fly more missions.

This case is not a difficult one, it requires no minute sifting of complicated facts, but it does require you to be sure beyond all reasonable doubt as to the guilt of the defendant.

( To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee)

In Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird , Atticus Finch is a lawyer representing Tom Robinson. Atticus presents the above statement to the jury, setting up an antithesis. He asserts that the case is not difficult and yet requires the jury to be absolutely sure of their decision. Atticus believes the case to have a very obvious conclusion, and hopes that the jury will agree with him, but he is also aware of the societal tensions at work that will complicate the case.

Test Your Knowledge of Antithesis

1. What is the correct antithesis definition? A. Using two very similar concepts and showing their subtle differences. B. Setting up a contrast between two opposite ideas or phrases in a balanced grammatical structure. C. Using words to convey an opposite meaning to their literal sense. [spoiler title=”Answer to Question #1″] Answer: B is the correct answer. A is one possible definition of juxtaposition, while C is one possible definition of irony.[/spoiler]

2. What is the difference between antithesis and juxtaposition? A. They are exactly the same device. B. They are completely different literary devices. C. Antithesis parallels opposite concepts, while juxtaposition sets up a comparison and contrast between two concepts that can be either similar or different. [spoiler title=”Answer to Question #2″] Answer: C is the correct answer.[/spoiler]

3. Which of the following quotes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth contains an example of antithesis? A. 

WITCHES: Fair is foul, and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air.

MACBETH: Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand?

WITCHES: Something wicked this way comes.

[spoiler title=”Answer to Question #3″] Answer: A is the correct answer.[/spoiler]

4. Which of the following quotes from Heller’s Catch-22 contains an example of antithesis? A. There are now fifty or sixty countries fighting in this war. Surely so many counties can’t all be worth dying for. B. He had decided to live forever or die in the attempt, and his only mission each time he went up was to come down alive. C. You’re inches away from death every time you go on a mission. How much older can you be at your age? [spoiler title=”Answer to Question #4″] Answer: B is the correct answer.[/spoiler]

What is Antithesis? Definition, Examples of Antitheses in Writing

Home » The Writer’s Dictionary » What is Antithesis? Definition, Examples of Antitheses in Writing

Antithesis definition: Antithesis is a literary and rhetorical device where two seemingly contrasting ideas are expressed through parallel structure.

What is Antithesis?

What does antithesis mean? An antithesis is just that—an “anti” “thesis.” An antithesis is used in writing to express ideas that seem contradictory.

An antithesis uses parallel structure of two ideas to communicate this contradiction.

Example of Antithesis:

• “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee.” –Muhammad Ali

First, the structure is parallel. Each “side” of the phrase has the same number of words and the same structure. Each uses a verb followed by a simile.

Second, the contracting elements of a butterfly and a bee seem contradictory. That is, a butterfly is light and airy while a bee is sharp and stinging. One person (a boxer, in this case) should not be able to possess these two qualities—this is why this is an antithesis.

However, Ali is trying to express how a boxer must be light on his feet yet quick with his fist.

Modern Examples of Antithesis

• “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.”

Through parallel structure, this quotation presents an antithesis. It seems contradictory that one action could be a “small step” and a “giant leap.”

However, this contradiction proposes that the action of landing on the moon might have just been a small physical step for the man Neil Armstrong, but it was a giant leap for the progress of mankind.

The Function of Antithesis

An antithesis stands out in writing. Because it uses parallel structure, an antithesis physically stands out when interspersed among other syntactical structures. Furthermore, an antithesis presents contrasting ideas that cause the reader or audience to pause and consider the meaning and purpose.

Oftentimes, the meaning of an antithesis is not overtly clear. That is, a reader or audience must evaluate the statement to navigate the meaning.

Writers utilize antitheses very sparingly. Since its purpose is to cause an audience to pause and consider the argument, it must be used with purpose and intent.

Antithesis Example from Literature

• “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity…”

From the beginning, Dickens presents two contradictory ideas in this antithesis.

How can it be the “best” and the “worst” of times? These two “times” should not be able to coexist.

Similarly, how can the setting of this novel also take place during an “age of wisdom” and an “age of foolishness?”

The antithesis continues.

Dickens opens his with these lines to set the tone for the rest of the novel. Clearly, there are two sides to this story, two tales of what is the truth. These two “sides” should not function peacefully. And, in fact, they do not. That, after all, is the “tale of two cities.”

Dickens sets up this disparity to set the tone for his novel, which will explore this topic.

Summary: What is an Antithesis?

Define antithesis: An antithesis consists of contrasting concepts presented in parallel structure.

Writers use antithesis to create emphasis to communicate an argument.

• Note: The plural form of antithesis is antitheses.

What is Antithesis? Definition, Usage, and Literary Examples

Antithesis definition.

Antithesis  (ann-TIH-thuh-suhs), put simply, means the absolute opposite of something. As a literary term, it refers to the juxtaposition of two opposing entities in parallel structure. Antithesis is an effective literary device because humans tend to define through contrast. Therefore, antithesis can help readers understand something by defining its opposite.

Antithesis  comes from the Latin word, via Greek, for “to place against.” It was first used in English in the 1520s as rhetorical term, but the concept goes back at least as far as Aristotle, who believed an argument could be strengthened by illustrating it with contrast.

Examples of Antithesis

• “Spicy food is heaven on the tongue but hell in the tummy.” The concepts of heaven and hell are opposites—the former being very pleasant and ideal, the latter being highly undesirable. This antithetical statement is using these concepts to convey that spicy food is delicious, but it can lead to an unfortunate digestive reaction.
• “I’m either an impressive vegetarian or a disappointing vegan.” On the scale between vegetarianism and the stricter veganism, the speaker’s current diet lies somewhere in the middle. So, while a vegetarian might applaud their efforts, a vegan might berate them for being so lax.
• “Psychiatrists write prescriptions, therapists prescribe writing.” This example includes a humorous inversion to explain the difference between psychiatrists and therapists. The former prescribes medicine to address mental issues on a biological level, while the latter might suggest a more psychologically focused approach, like journaling, as a way of easing mental stress.

Antithesis vs. Other Comparative Terms

There are several literary terms that, like antithesis, make comparisons between two things or concepts that are opposites or contrast in some way. Three such terms are  dichotomy ,  oxymoron , and foil.

Dichotomy is a division between two entities, whereas antithesis pits two opposing entities against each other. For example, the colors black and white are considered opposites, but they are not in opposition; they can’t be in conflict nor do they cancel each other out. The concepts of war and peace, on the other hand, are at odds and can’t be reconciled.

An oxymoron is a contradiction in terms, but unlike antithesis, these terms are working together. The basic oxymoron construction is a word + an antonymic modifier, and the two essentially function as a single unit. For example, calling something a “minor crisis” is an oxymoron because  minor  implies something insignificant, while  crisis  means it requires immediate attention. Based on this, an oxymoron can’t be a component of antithesis because the point of the latter is to pit two things against each other.

Where antithesis is a verbal or written opposition, a foil is a literary opposition, usually embodied by a character in a narrative. For example, Draco Malfoy can be considered Harry Potter’s foil in the  Harry Potter  series because where Harry is honorable and loyal, Draco is somewhat corrupt and unfaithful.

Antithesis Outside of Literature

A common theme in American popular music is the difference between the middle and lower classes. In “Men of Good Fortune” by Lou Reed, the singer describes all the things rich men can do that poor men cannot:

Men of good fortune

Often cause empires to fall

While men of poor beginnings

Often can’t do anything at all

Antithesis is common in political speeches, particularly when it comes to the underrepresented pushing for equitable policies. In Malcolm X’s famous “ Ballot or the Bullet ”  speech, he discusses how America was built by Black and indigenous people for white people’s benefit, saying, “We didn’t land on Plymouth Rock; the rock was landed on us.”

Examples of Antithesis in Literature

1. Charles Dickens,  A Tale of Two Cities

This classic tale of love and sacrifice features the French Revolution as its backdrop. In this tumultuous era, where the differences between the haves and the have-nots was at its starkest, Dickens illustrates the antithetical concepts that existed simultaneously:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way […]

2. William Shakespeare,  The Merchant of Venice

At the beginning of this romantic comedy, chatty lout Gratiano wants to understand why his friend Antonio is so down—and why anyone would ever be down at all:

And let my liver rather heat with wine

Than my heart cool with mortifying groans.

Gratiano is implying that he’d rather experience life through a chemically altered (and therefore unreliable) lens than face any ordeals, even though they would be truer to reality.

3. John Milton,  Paradise Lost

Milton’s epic poem explores many facets of the Christian bible and belief systems—including the concept of free will. When Lucifer, once one of God’s brightest angels, is cast into Hell, he says, “Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven.” This leads the reader to question whether anyone is truly free, though ultimately the Bible’s core argument is that willingly giving over control to God is what will leads to a happy life.

Further Resources on Antithesis

MasterClass’s  How to Use Antithesis in Your Writing  course is a concise guide on the mechanics of antithesis and when to use it.

This excerpt from  Hegel for Beginners  by Lloyd Spencer is a handy introduction to antithesis as a component of dialectics (a system for pursuing truth by way of logical argument).

Related Terms

• Juxtaposition

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A Surf Legend’s Long Ride

By William Finnegan

Jock Sutherland’s childhood home, on Oahu’s North Shore, was a picturesque ruin when he brought me there. It was built after the attack on Pearl Harbor: a wooden barracks at the water’s edge, part of the military’s frantic preparations for a second attack. The building had a soft V shape, as if embracing the ocean, with a line of louvred windows opening onto a basic deck. Waves pounded the rocky point below. Sutherland’s mother, Audrey, bought the house in 1961, for fifteen thousand dollars, and lived there for nearly sixty years.

I thought the place looked salvageable, but Sutherland said no. “Dry rot. Rust. The walls are racked. It’s a teardown.”

He sounded so unsentimental.

“Anyway, look at the neighborhood.”

He gave me an eyebrow signal that I had to interpret. We couldn’t actually see the neighbors. We were in the yard, surrounded by coconut palms, lush vegetation, an ancient unpainted stake fence. I decided I knew what he meant: mansions were slowly filling every lot along this part of the coast. In fact, Jock and his siblings had already sold this place to wealthy mainlanders. But the new owners seemed to be in no hurry to build, so Jock was still taking care of the yard, and using it to park his van while he surfed nearby.

“Looks fun out there,” he said, peering at waves breaking on a reef off the point. It did look fun. We paddled out through a gantlet of blue-gray lava rocks. I tried to mimic Sutherland’s every move—he had been navigating this tiny, swirling channel since the nineteen-fifties—but still managed to slice my foot. Out in the channel, he took my foot in his hands, studying the cut from various angles. “That’s not from a rock. You kicked an ‘ opihi ”—a limpet. “We can clean it later. I’ve got some good stuff.”

There were a dozen people out, and every one of them greeted Jock as he paddled past: little shakas and fist bumps with old regulars. This spot, where the waves range greatly in quality and intensity, is known as Jocko’s. The eponymous local had arrived.

Jock paddled west, angling away from the pack. A few minutes later, when a set of big waves appeared, he was far outside, the only surfer in position. He caught the first wave, paddling hard, jumping up with a fierce expression. There were shouts of encouragement, tribal ululations. I thought I saw, as I paddled over the shoulder, Jock’s lip curling in a wicked grin.

Sutherland surfs unusually well for a man of seventy-five. Surfing well at his age is unusual, full stop. But he has spent his whole life, nearly, in this wave-rich corner of Oahu. He’s wiry, long-armed, spry, disturbingly lean—five-ten, one-thirty-five—and he still carries, across his upper back, a serious rack of paddling muscles. He works as a roofer, running a small company, and gets in the water whenever possible. His hair is short and gray, his skin sun-punished and deeply lined. But his glance is sharp, and his default expression is a level, knowing, impish gaze. You need to watch the eyebrows.

Although Jock didn’t know it, he and I went way back. I’m a few years younger, and also started surfing as a kid. But my family lived in Los Angeles, where the surf craze of the early sixties—call it the “Gidget” boom—was being manufactured. Jock was out here, on the North Shore of Oahu. Surfing has a cultish aspect, and many of its pilgrimage sites are in this small corner of Hawaii. When I took my vows, surfing had a sacred text, too—a magazine called Surfer , which outsiders inevitably called “the Bible of the sport.”

The magazine was created by John Severson, a California surfer and filmmaker who wanted to counter the “Gidget” version with something closer to the real thing. One of his inspired gimmicks was the Reader Poll, which débuted in 1963 and produced an annual list of the world’s best surfers. For my friends and me, the Surfer poll established a righteous pantheon. I can still name the top twenty from that first year, possibly in order.

In the mid-sixties, a flashy young haole (Hawaiian for “white person”) named Jock Sutherland made his move on surfing’s main stage—known simply as the North Shore—riding enormous waves with rare, almost playful aplomb. He was, unlike most surfers, a switch-foot, able to ride equally well leading with his left foot or his right. As a goofy-foot (right foot forward), he rode the Banzai Pipeline, the world’s most famous, most photogenic, and, at that time, most dangerous wave. Images of Jock in stylish high gear at huge Pipeline, one hand delicately grazing the water’s surface, hung in the bedrooms of surf rats everywhere. He rose swiftly through the Surfer poll, and in 1969 was No. 1—the consensus best surfer in the world.

When I mentioned this achievement, faux casually, Jock gave me the fish eye. “That whole thing was rigged,” he said. “Severson decided who would win. I had a part in a film he was releasing.”

We were eating home-cooked Asian-style mixed vegetables at his place, a modest upstairs apartment in the hills above the North Shore. I should not have been shocked, but I was. Hadn’t I faithfully voted, after long deliberations, in each Reader Poll? Hadn’t I worshipped the surfing of young Jock? Of course, I didn’t know anything about him beyond a few great film clips and some classic stills.

His place was jammed with books, magazines, cookware, and tools, but there was no shelf of trophies or mementos—just a faded poster in a hallway from the 1967 Duke Kahanamoku Invitational, a major surf contest that Jock won. He had recently been elected to something called the Hawaii Waterman Hall of Fame, which throws a big banquet in Honolulu. Evidence of the award was nowhere to be seen.

A surfer as famous as he was could have made enough money for an easy retirement, I thought, but Sutherland hadn’t cashed in. Surfing was never, to his mind, a job. Even when he was at the apex of the surfing world, he was unimpressed, stubborn. There was no pro tour in those days. “You could work for a board manufacturer, maybe have your own signature-model board,” he told me. “But that meant sell, sell, sell. That was . . . crass . I mean, the banality. It was antithetical to being able to enjoy being out in the water.”

Jock built a different sort of life on his home coast. He’s seemingly everybody’s favorite roofer, a part-time farmer, a revered elder with garrulous tendencies. I’ve heard him called “the mayor of the North Shore.” My old starstruck view of him was pure projection. In truth, he was, from an early age, leading a strange, half-wild, quite complicated existence.

When Jock was twelve, his mother sent him to stay with a man known as the Hermit of Kalalau, on the island of Kauai. The hermit lived in a cave on the Nāpali Coast—a roadless wilderness where sea cliffs rise as high as four thousand feet. “That was actually his summer cave, down by the beach,” Jock told me. “He had a winter cave up the valley.”

The hermit’s name was Dr. Bernard Wheatley. “I was the object of his displeasure,” Jock recalled. “Being a kid, I was unaware of the imperatives of his existence. There was a good little bodysurfing wave out front, but he didn’t want me to swim out there. He was responsible for me. I started whining, and I ended up bodysurfing it.”

Jock enjoyed himself in Kalalau. “It was like a summer camp, but for more serious stuff than laying around playing cards,” he said. “We did a lot of foraging.” They also did some hunting—Jock had brought along the family .22. Dr. Wheatley warmed to him, slightly: “He tolerated me. I was curious. I had potential.”

Jock suspected that his mother wanted him to spend time with a father figure. His father, John Lauren Sutherland, was a Coast Guard officer who had left the family when Jock was ten. How did his mother know Dr. Wheatley? Well, he was her type of person. She had a job with the Army, doing education counselling, and was raising four kids alone, but she frequented the wilder coasts of Hawaii and had an exceptionally wide circle of friends.

Audrey Sutherland was a one-off. She grew up in California, went to U.C.L.A. at sixteen for international relations, worked as a riveter in the Second World War. She became a long-distance swimmer, married a sailor, worked in commercial fishing, and moved to Oahu in 1952. There she did substitute teaching, taught swimming, got her Army job. Her kids, growing up in the decommissioned barracks at the ocean’s edge, were all water babies. After their father left, they scrounged. “When you’re poor,” Jock told me, “you learn how to find food on the reefs, hunt, pick wild fruit, trade with your neighbors. We set out lobster traps. Spearfishing, night diving. Got a lot of fruit from the hills.”

Audrey drew up a list of things that every child should be able to do by age sixteen and stuck it on the wall. It read, in part:

—Clean a fish and dress a chicken —Write a business letter —Splice or put a fixture on an electric cord —Operate a sewing machine and mend your own clothes —Handle a boat safely and competently —Save someone drowning using available equipment —Read at a tenth grade level —Listen to an adult talk with interest and empathy —Dance with any age

This list changed with the times, adding computers and contraception, and nobody really kept score, but everybody got the idea.

Audrey had what she called a “wildcat need” to take wilderness trips alone. She used her short vacations from her Army job to explore backcountry Hawaii—climbing volcanoes, swimming remote coasts, living off the land. She swam the northeast shore of Molokai, perhaps the wildest coast in the islands, from east to west, pulling her supplies behind her on a line. That took a week. She hiked into narrow, once inhabited valleys, got into terrible scrapes on cliffs and landings, nearly lost her life on more than one occasion. In 1978, she published a book about her Molokai expeditions called, after Louisa May Alcott, “Paddling My Own Canoe.”

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Audrey had a theory about relations with her kids: “They decided letting me be crazy gave them more freedom.” But sometimes she took one of them along for what Jock called “our mountain education.” The Sutherlands didn’t have a TV when Jock was young, and Audrey was proud to raise readers. The kids went to high school in Waialua, an old sugar-mill town a few miles down the coast. A retired county lifeguard who worked with Jock’s younger brother told me, “All those Sutherlands were really fucking smarty-pants. They read way more books than anybody else.”

Once, Jock and I went inside their old house and wandered its creaky-floored rooms. The house was emptied out, but he described every piece of furniture in the main room as it had been. He put his hands out in one spot, where shelves had held the family’s shell collection. He named shell after shell, in English and Hawaiian and Latin, as if he were looking at them, murmuring and moving from one shelf to the next.

Jock’s father introduced him to surfing—on an old balsa board, as he recalls. He began to surf at spots he could paddle to, or walk to with a board on his head—and surfboards then weighed nearly as much as he did. Just to the west was Laniakea, just to the east Chun’s Reef. Both are well-known breaks, and yet, surfing them with Jock, you learn that every peak and chunk of reef has a hyperlocalized name: “That’s Piddlies, and that thing over there is Chuckleheads.”

The North Shore has a concentration of spots that, in the wintertime, break bigger and better than any other known coast, and in the fifties a trickle of doughty Californians began making the pilgrimage, testing their skill and nerve alongside a small crew of locals. A few big-wave surfers became household names—at least in the households where I hung out. Board-makers started shaping specialized boards, known as “guns,” for riding huge waves.

But the first time Jock surfed Waimea Bay, which was then considered the largest ridable wave in the world, he did so on the same battered board he rode at Piddlies. He was fifteen. “It was pretty consequential, riding a board that wasn’t all that fast,” he recalled, quietly. His talent drew attention, and older guys started giving him lifts to more distant spots, like Sunset Beach, a complex big-wave reef break farther east. A local board shaper, Dick Brewer, befriended Jock. “He was kind of a proxy father,” Jock said. The relationship had its transactional side. Brewer gave Jock boards that let him surf faster, harder, more freely, and people saw the Brewer sticker under his feet.

Although there was no pro tour yet, there were contests. Jock won the Hawaiian State Championships three years in a row, and in 1966 placed second in the World Championships, in San Diego. These events were all held in small waves—not his specialty—but he was wicked fast, technically solid, and unpredictable. He switched stance, which is something you rarely see in contests. In unchallenging waves, he did silly but difficult things like taking off fin first. He seemed to be out there having fun, and yet he usually won. When he won the 1967 Duke Kahanamoku Invitational, it was the biggest deal in competitive surfing, at least in Hawaii, and it was held at Sunset, in serious waves. Jock, who was still in his teens, got no prize money.

But it was not in contests that he made his name. It was at Pipeline, which sits roughly halfway between Waimea and Sunset Beach. A few surfers rode Pipeline well, notably Butch Van Artsdalen, a hellion from La Jolla. But most people were afraid of it. When Pipe is working, it breaks with stupendous force in shallow water, producing one of the world’s most beautiful, deadly tubes. Jock and his buddies started riding it on small days. “I made one or two out of ten,” he said.

He kept at it, refining his approach. He started making the takeoffs, and seeing how to avoid the heavy lip, by quickly finding a ridable line and “pulling in”—crouching close to the face and letting the barrel envelop him. Then, with perfect positioning and a bit of luck, he would be thrown into the clear by the explosive force of the lip’s impact. Jock seemed to have more time as he rode than anybody else did. Dropping in to the heaviest waves, he would fade and stall, casually timing his bottom turn to set up the deepest possible barrel. He would disappear into the roaring darkness, then reappear, usually, going very fast, with that little grin.

Pipeline is the Formula 1 of surfing. To ride it well requires a combination of fast-twitch reactions, steady nerves, and board-riding skills so precise that only a few surfers in the world possess them. Jock once rode big Pipe at a level not seen before. Today’s Pipe rippers charge far harder.

Not long ago, I sat on the beach and watched Jock surf alone at ‘Ehukai, the beach park that includes Pipeline, on a small day when random soft blue peaks and walls were running east across the sandbars. There was nobody else out. He seemed to be always on a wave, milking it down the beach, lanky and graceful on a nine-foot board, expertly reading the vagaries of each swell, pulling out just before the shore break, then paddling back out at an accelerated pace and gliding into another one. It was a master class in making the most of small, disorganized surf, and in aging elegantly as a surfer.

Surfing with Jock can be less serene. If he decides you need instruction, it can be like surfing with a drill sergeant. “Breathe, Bill!” he barks at me, out at Chun’s Reef. I am breathing. I’ve been doing this a long time, too. We’re in not very good waves, and he’s full of advice. “Shake out your arms. Keep moving around.” He follows his own instructions, shaking out his arms. He introduces me to a local kid on a longboard. As the kid paddles up the reef, Jock says, sotto voce, “Excellent water photographer. Excellent longboarder, too.” The kid catches a wave up the line and immediately affirms that assessment.

Jock knows everybody on the North Shore, but he seems to keep special track of good photographers, like the old cover-shot surfer he is. A set comes through, and we need to scramble out. Jock, as always, gets a head start, and catches the first wave. Afterward, he paddles back out and asks me, shyly, if he looked dorky jumping up regular-foot (that’s left foot forward, not his more natural stance), and I assure him that he looked smooth. He nods happily—never too late for vanity.

Later, he insists that I take off in front of him. It’s a small wave, not much wall, and I’m not sure what we’re doing riding it together. He yells, “Come back!” He’s gesturing at me to ride toward him, which I do, though it makes no sense. He keeps gesturing. Now we’re on a collision course. “More!” He cuts back to give me more room. I keep heading toward him, against my better judgment. Our boards are now inches apart. The wave is a dribbler. “O.K.!” he yells, steering away and pointing at the wave beyond me. I turn and see that this small, weak wave has hit a shallow shelf of coral, far closer to shore than people normally surf at Chun’s. The wave stands up, chest high, turns smooth as pearl, and I find myself flying through a lovely section, the sun infusing the lip with a gray-green glow. Jock, now far behind, is giving me a thumbs-up.

He’s even bossy about how to end a session. I’ll throw my board in a car and maybe put on dry clothes and head off. In Jock’s world, you find the hose under the bushes behind the old house, then wash the salt off not only your body but your board. (That’s new.) You wrap the leash just so around the fins or, better, remove it from the board entirely, coil it carefully, and then dry the board with a towel. (Also new.) Then, if necessary, you rub the bottom of the board with a foam-filled nylon sock called a Pickle. (A Pickle?) Then you slip the board gently into an immaculate bag, and slip all that gently into the van.

There’s more. As you wrap a beach towel around your waist to change, be careful to keep your feet free of dirt. There’s a designated little rug to stand on, and a rag to clean your feet. And, speaking of feet, cross the yard only at certain angles, because some patches of the grass have sharp little stickers. Wet trunks and rash guards go in a special bucket.

I resist all this rigmarole the first few times we surf together. Jock shakes his head in pity and disapproval. Then, one day, I decide to do everything his way, just for the hell of it. Rinse the board, dry the board. Wet trunks in the bucket. The rituals are oddly soothing. It’s the upside of O.C.D.—everything in its place. These boards will last forever the way we’re treating them.

“Now you’re gettin’ it, Bill.”

As one of the world’s best-known surfers, Jock was always in the mags, but he laughs at the idea that he was ever in a media spotlight. “There was no spotlight,” he says. “It was a few people. A few photographers, a monthly magazine in California, usually getting everything wrong.”

Still, he gave interviewers their money’s worth, sometimes more. Asked by Surfer about his approach, he soliloquized: “You case out the surroundings as fully as possible, find as many variables as you can and their differentiating planes. So, for example, you’re working with two main mediums—sea and air. First, you understand the air variables, the wind and the clouds and the sun, recognize them as part of the territory, and apply them. Then you recognize the water variables, such as consistency of swell, number of people in the lineup, the different types of reformations occurring.”

Air variables? Was he putting us on? He seemed both geeky-earnest and tongue-in-cheek. Asked about the interior of a large Pipeline barrel that he had successfully navigated, he said, “Spacious for sure. Just like the Pope’s living room. Even with all the bric-a-brac, paintings and big overstuffed chairs and sofas.”

This quote lodged in the collective surf memory, becoming a fancy metaphor for a deep barrel. At the 2012 U.S. Open, Surfer called its bar-restaurant the Pope’s Living Room. But Jock told me that he actually never said it. “The Pope doesn’t even have a living room,” he said. “That’s gauche, maudlin, inaccurate—and uncomplimentary to the Pope.” The journalist who did that interview insists that Jock did say it. And, for that matter, the Pope does have a living room. But it was 1969, for Christ’s sake. People were smoking a lot of spliffs, on both ends of the interview couch.

The wave of recreational drugs that flooded American youth culture in the late sixties was a tsunami among surfers. Cannabis and psychedelics—LSD, mescaline—seemed designed to make you surf better. Jock took this inspiration to the limit. “I was pretty wild,” he says today. “I worried that I set a bad example.”

Outlandish stories swirled around Jock, who was sometimes called the Sunshine Superman, for a popular variety of LSD known as Orange Sunshine. On the North Shore, he and his pals liked to start their acid trips in the mountains of the Ko‘olau Range, which runs down the east side of Oahu. They knew the mountain streams, and where to find the old work camps from the sugarcane plantations, which had been abandoned as Hawaii’s sugar industry shrank. The workers had kept fabulous gardens, which were now full of wild fruit and vegetables. At some point, Jock’s troupe would head for the coast, to rinse off the day’s psychic grime in the surf.

Psychedelics weren’t harmless—we all came to know many acid casualties. But they had, as many contemporary researchers know, the power of revelation, the potential to expand self-awareness. Jeff Hakman, the other young haole phenom of the period, told an interviewer that the best surfing experience of his life had been enhanced by LSD, and shared with Sutherland. “We used to call him the Extraterrestrial because he was so good at everything,” Hakman said. “He could beat anyone at chess or Scrabble; he could smoke more hash than anyone, take more acid, and still go out there and surf better than anyone.” You never knew what Jock would do on a wave, except that it was likely to be something you had never seen before, like side-slipping in the barrel at Sunset or switching stance at big Waimea. It was no surprise to anyone that he took the top spot in the 1969 Surfer Reader Poll.

But, before the magazine could hold its awards banquet, Jock executed his most radical move yet. Without telling anyone, not even his mother, he went down to the local recruiting station and joined the Army. This was around the height of the Vietnam War, when half a million American troops were there. Jock started basic training at Fort Ord, California, in January, 1970. Surfer cancelled the banquet, and did not offer another Reader Poll for the next nine years.

In interviews over the decades, Jock has given various explanations for why he signed up. In the nineteen-nineties, he mentioned an ideological divide that had cleaved surfing. “The pro-contest guys were anti-drug and I was, ahhh , shall we say, pro-choice,” he told the surf historian Matt Warshaw. “Meanwhile all the anti-contest guys were on my back, telling me to get off my contest kick and just surf. Except I liked contests! So I was sick of all the tension.”

There was also a local cultural imperative, he said. “This might be a difference between us here in Hawaii and you guys in Southern California, but there was a challenge aspect to the war. I was a local boy, bred in the country, pretty tough, and I just thought I could handle Nam. I wanted to see how I’d stack up.”

When I pressed him on it, he said, “The military is a big deal here. My parents both worked for the military. My dad served in World War Two and in Korea. A lot of my classmates from high school enlisted and went to Vietnam.” Jock knew that lots of his “Caucasian friends,” as he put it, thought his spontaneous enlistment was crazy. Many surfers he knew were busy dodging the draft. “But some people in the community gave me credit for enlisting,” he told me. “It was an honorable thing to do till Vietnam.”

Nearly everybody in his basic-training unit was from Hawaii. He was in training as a field wire repairman, one of the more dangerous Army jobs. Many field wire repairmen were going to Vietnam and not coming back. At Fort Ord, Jock finally began to have doubts about the war. Maybe he didn’t really care to find out how he would stack up. Maybe he just had second thoughts. (When we talked about it, he referred me to Christopher Hitchens’s book on Henry Kissinger: “It’s about the vicious idiocy of our élites.”) A sergeant recognized him from the surf magazines, and, Jock said, “he pulled some strings and got me rerouted to clerk typist. He probably saved my life.” Jock learned to type, used his off-duty hours to surf around Monterey, and was honorably discharged at the end of 1971.

In his absence, surfing’s pecking order had changed. Not long before he signed up, Dru Harrison, one of the top California surfers from his age cohort, had written in a surf mag, “Hey Jock, why don’t you lay off for a year and let the rest of the world catch up?” Then, “Hey Jock, make that two years.” Harrison got his wish.

While Jock was at basic, another Oahu surfer, Gerry Lopez, stepped into his role at Pipeline, with a feline, unadorned style that perfectly fit the wave. When Jock came back, the two surfed Pipe together. “He had not lost a step,” Lopez told a reporter.

By then, Lopez had co-founded a surfboard company, Lightning Bolt. Surfing’s popularity was booming globally, and Lightning Bolt, cleverly marketed, boomed with it. There were surfers out hustling sponsorships, not just from board-makers but from apparel companies, and eventually even doing beer commercials. But Jock, fresh out of the Army, felt that he needed a regular job. “Surfing didn’t offer much,” he told me, and shrugged. He worked in a surf shop in Honolulu, then became an apprentice roofer. “The money was good, especially after I got in the union,” he said.

The next few years were both happy and sad. Jock fell in love with Frances Cunningham, whom he describes as “gracious, tall, willowy, Lithuanian Irish.” Frannie came from a prosperous suburb in East Honolulu. It was 1972, and she was taking a long walk on the wild side. She and Jock got married in a shotgun wedding, as he called it, soon had two sons, and then found themselves living in an old quonset hut on a gravel road in the cane fields of Haleiwa, the main town on the North Shore. “We grew taro and hasu —that’s lotus root,” Jock told me. “There was an irrigation ditch and huge cane rats. We’d hear these big traps go bang at night and then twenty seconds of heavy rat thrashing.”

Frannie spent most of her time marooned in this romantic idyll with the babies. Jock was working full time, including roofing jobs on outer islands, and, inevitably, when the waves were good, he was surfing. “I spent less time than I should have with my family,” he told me. At some point, Frannie packed up the kids and moved back to her parents’ comfortable house in town. She and Jock separated in 1976. It was amicable, and the boys, Matt and Gavin, surfed with their dad. Today, Gavin often works with Jock as a roofer.

“It looks like I was a little parsimonious with the caulk here,” Jock says, peering up under the edge of a roof vent. We’re on a steeply sloped roof—dimensional shingles, asphalt and fibreglass—in a little subdivision behind Sunset Point. The house belongs to Mike Takahashi, a surfer and a retired salesman. Jock put the roof on six years ago, with two skylights. Skylights are infamously difficult to seal, but that’s what the client wanted. Now Mike has seen water coursing down the shingles, then missing the rain gutter. Jock says that’s just water wicking back from the overhang. But now he’s studying the skylights. He’s wearing open-heeled sandals—what people in Hawaii call slippahs—but he seems as sure-footed as a spider, twenty-five feet off the ground. I stay where I am, with a death grip on a good edge, and try to follow his calculations about where rainwater might seep. He checks the seals on the skylights.

“Electrolysis,” he says. “This copper step flashing is corroding because it’s touching the aluminum top frame. I’ll put a piece of stainless steel in there, or some other inert material. Maybe some silicone caulking.”

Takahashi seems to trust Jock’s expertise. On our way down, he mutters to me, “He’s the best.”

“I’ll come back Tuesday with the right tools,” Jock says.

Another day, another roof. This one’s in Pupukea Heights, a one-story house surrounded by a big yard with a pair of old hardwood trees—a lychee and a dragon’s-eye, under which goats are grazing. The house belongs to Mark Healey, a big-wave surfer. Healey, like Jock a North Shore homeboy, is a pro surfer in the new entrepreneurial mode. He makes little or no money from competing, but he works as a stuntman in film, has a YouTube channel and assorted sponsors, and offers high-priced courses in diving, spearfishing, bow-hunting, and big-wave survival.

People in surf world who have houses on the North Shore all seem to want Jock for their roofs. He does work for Kelly Slater, the eleven-time world champion, who has a beachfront mansion, west of Laniakea, with roof problems from a coconut tree someone planted in the wrong spot. From Healey’s roof, we can see a gallery of others. An old friend of his, Mark Cunningham, brother of Frannie, told me, “If you took a drone shot of the North Shore and marked every roof that Jock built or has fixed, you wouldn’t believe it. There’s thousands of houses, and he’s probably worked on half of them.”

There are a few expensive-looking houses in Pupukea Heights, but the money is down on the coast. “Lot of families up here, some retired military,” Jock says. Property values and rents have climbed on the North Shore for decades, driving out poor and working-class people. When I ask Jock about the community he grew up in, he says, “There were a lot more Hawaiians.” There are areas legally designated as Hawaiian Home Lands, where people who have at least fifty per cent Native blood can lease low-value land cheaply and build houses. Oahu has numerous Hawaiian Home Lands. Three of the island’s four coasts have them. The North Shore has none.

The West Side of Oahu has far more Hawaiian residents than the North Shore does. It also has crushing burdens of poverty, crime, and homelessness. That week, Jock had already gone three times to the West Side, a two-hour round trip, to work on the roof of a children’s educational center. This was volunteer work for a group that encourages at-risk youth to get in the ocean.

On Healey’s roof, Jock wants to re-paint the edge to guard against a sooty algae that’s common in Hawaii. He gives me the Latin— Gloeocapsa magma —and wonders why more roofing companies don’t use algae block to prevent it. Mark Cunningham told me that he had been haranguing Jock for decades to become a contractor: “Get off the roof, schmooze with the clients, hire a bunch of young guys to do the hard work.” But Jock was stubborn, and he didn’t trust anybody, with the provisional exception of Gavin, to get it right. “I don’t want to be up here when I’m ninety,” he told me, querulously, on Healey’s roof, as if I had argued for that. “It’s dangerous work!”

The North Shore surfing-industrial complex has grown considerably from its modest origins—just as surfing itself has gone from a local obsession in a few coastal enclaves to a global pastime with tens of millions of practitioners. During the big-wave season on the North Shore, which starts in roughly November, tens of thousands of surfers, photographers, and camp followers descend on the Seven-Mile Miracle, as it has been styled. Every ambitious young surfer needs to get his or her ticket punched, preferably annually, on the North Shore. The first event of the season on the world pro tour is held at Pipeline, the second at Sunset, and other major contests, some with large purses, are also held at Pipe, effectively privatizing the break for weeks at a time, since only contestants are allowed in the water during heats. Several of the beachfront houses at Pipe are occupied by companies, “surf brands” like Volcom and Billabong, that sponsor both contests and pro surfers.

The perceived glamour of high-calibre surfing on spectacular waves has drawn both gawkers and substantial idle wealth from all over, typically investing in second homes and vacation rentals, pricing out the locals. That ramshackle public-housing complex at Velzyland? Now it’s a gated community. Sean Penn bought a place in there. V-Land is a sweet, eccentric wave east of Sunset Point. It was a hotbed of local talent when I was a kid.

When Pipe goes off—big, luminous, sculpted, murderous—filmers and photographers line the berm. In the water, on the shoulder of the great wave, a scrum of water cameras forms. Surfers learn to ignore them, riding right over the photographers as they blow out of the barrel and make their coasting victory pullouts. A few top Pipe riders have taken to gripping GoPro cameras between their teeth. They need the content for their YouTube channels, their vlogs, their Instagram stories, their sponsors. Beach-shot footage, drone footage, water footage, and point-of-view footage, sometimes of the same great ride—it’s all money in the bank.

Pipeline has killed surfers—there are nine names on a wooden memorial near the beach, and at least one recent death is not yet up there. The lifeguards have saved countless people, sprinting out of their tower. The first casualty Jock remembers was a Peruvian kid who hit the reef and died. It doesn’t need to be big. Malik Joyeux, known for his exploits at Teahupo‘o—a mutant Tahitian wave that’s perhaps even more dangerous than Pipeline—was killed on an eight-foot day at Pipe. With advanced lifesaving, including Jet Skis, brain damage has become more common than death. But even pros who survive hitting the reef at Pipe head first rarely surf the same way afterward.

Jock broke his femur in the early eighties, not at Pipe but at Jocko’s. “It was an eight-foot wave, and I had to go around a friend who was paddling out. Lip landed right on me,” he said. “I tried to get back on my board, but my leg just hung there, like a dead eel. My friends had to help me get in.” The accident affected his surfing. “I was afraid of the lip for about a year after that.” The lip is the most violent part of the wave, and being afraid of it is a natural reaction—a survival instinct that Jock seemed to have temporarily acquired, until he lost it again.

The real problem for Jock came on land. During his convalescence from the broken leg, he lived next door to a cocaine dealer. Cocaine was cutting a deep swath across surf world. The roster of drug-related casualties is long and includes some of the best in the sport, such as Andy Irons, a three-time world champion from Kauai, who died in 2010 while still on tour. Jock developed a habit, along with half the people he knew. “I started selling bindles,” he told me, ruefully. “I never made money. I didn’t cut my stuff, just eyed up amounts. Then I got busted muling a pound for somebody else. So stupid. That really shocked my mom.”

He was arrested by federal agents while coming off a flight from Los Angeles. He pleaded guilty to possession and did two and a half years, at a minimum-security federal prison in California and another in Oregon. “I did camp maintenance. Played a lot of baseball. A working vacation, basically.” Though he shrugs it off now, jail was the nadir of his life. He didn’t even use the time inside to stay strong. “My first paddle across from Jocko’s to Chun’s after jail wore me out.” He laughs flatly. “I was in a halfway house in town for six months.” His older sister, Noëlle, once asked him why he started dealing coke. His answer, she told me, was so naked and unassuming, it may be a first in the annals of crime: “I wanted people to be happy to see me show up.”

There’s a patch of sand in front of Audrey’s old house, fronted by gray rocks with seawater sloshing through them. In the afternoon, with the sun beating on the sand, the little beach fills with sea turtles, who crawl ashore to warm themselves. The Hawaiian green sea turtle, known as honu , is among the largest in the world. It’s an endangered species, illegal even to touch without a permit. On the beach, they’re easy to mistake for rocks. I think so, anyway. Jock doesn’t have that problem.

“Aw, no, look at that guy,” he said one day, as we were crossing the sand. “That tumor is huge.” He indicated a sleeping turtle with, now that he mentioned it, a bulging growth on the side of his throat. “I’ll tell the research people about him. Maybe they can do something.”

The research people, who were from the University of Hawaii, came often. They counted, measured, photographed the turtles, took readings. Jock pointed out to them that the turtles liked this spot partly because of a freshwater spring that flowed from under some rocks. He led them to the rocks in question. We all drank water from cupped hands—cold and fresh, sure enough, even with seawater all around. The researchers took photos and notes. Jock waggled his eyebrows.

Honu have become a tourist attraction. They live in numbers along the North Shore—which now reportedly pulls almost half of Oahu’s six million annual visitors up to its beaches and its single two-lane highway. Some of the visitors come to see big-wave surfing, but more reliably they come to see and photograph turtles. The best-known turtle-viewing spot is Laniakea, and local government has failed to adequately accommodate the hordes of vehicles, which often means bumper-to-bumper traffic for miles. The tourists, or at least their cars, provoke local ire.

On another afternoon, an Asian family came staggering along the shore toward Audrey’s old place. It was rough walking, over big sharp rocks. The patch of sand was a much needed break for the hikers, and on it they found their elusive goal—turtles. They took photos. Jock went down to say hi. They spoke no English, so he tried a few Asian languages on them. They turned out to be Korean tourists, and they seemed gobsmacked when he welcomed them: “ Annyeong-haseyo .” He took them through the yard to the road, sparing them the hard hike back. “You should be able to say a few basic things in all major languages,” he told me after they left. He had most of the big Asian and European languages covered.

Jock’s version of the North Shore lies underneath, or behind, the front-lit surfing spectacle that photo-bombs the place each winter. Some longtimers find ways to hang on, usually by moving up into the hills above Waimea, where Jock lives. Some of these folks find profit streams in the mobs of well-heeled visitors—selling T-shirts, running food trucks, teaching surfing at a gentle wave near Haleiwa, renting houses and rooms through Airbnb.

Jock doesn’t have much interest in the carriage trade. Small farms and working ranches survive on the North Shore, and, as the old pineapple and sugarcane plantations farther inland have closed, more arable land has become available to local farmers. Jock has a share in a mango orchard. He and his partners sell mangoes to Foodland, a supermarket on the North Shore. Much of the produce that doesn’t go to Foodland goes into Jock’s van for personal distribution.

The van is a dark-blue Honda Odyssey, jammed to the ceiling with surfboards, buckets, an ice chest, a first-aid kit, and tools he uses in his roofing business. The tools include hammers, pry bars, scratch awls, many sizes of nails, two machetes, a whetstone, and industrial-sized tubes of caulking and sealant. There are cedar shingles, rolls of tarpaper, squares of asphalt. But the items that grab the eye are white buckets filled with gleaming mangoes, guava fruit, fresh-picked avocados. The ice chest next to the fruit is typically full of smoked fish, fresh fish, smoked pork, poke, and homemade avocado delicacies. This spread is why people call Jock’s van the Rolling North Shore Farmers’ Market.

None of it is for sale. He seems to give most of it away—to old friends, new friends, strangers, frenemies, lifeguards, roofing clients. The rest he trades with other people in a sprawling network. “There are a lot of fishermen, farmers, and hunters out here,” he says. This is obvious from the constant texts and calls Jock gets while on his rounds. “You’re coming in with aku? You bet I’ll take some, bradah. How’s the wind out there?” I’ve found it hard to pay for things when I’m with Jock on the North Shore. After a long meal at a popular restaurant called Haleiwa Joe’s, and at least twenty conversations with people passing our table, I couldn’t get the cashier to take my money. “ Ohana discount,” he said. Ohana means “family.”

A solid north swell hits the North Shore. It’s way out of season, nearly May. Jock and I check Pipe. The crowd is so thick that the surfers look, from down the beach, like ants stuck on a glue trap, an undulant mass. It’s dead glassy, no wind, and very ominous-looking. The water is gray, almost brown, and the swell seems bunched up for its size. Ten-foot waves come through, and nobody in the crowd even tries to take off. The waves detonate on the reef, most with no corner, no shoulder, confirming the wisdom of the crowd’s prudence. The bunched-up swell makes a two-wave hold-down look all too possible. “Not user-friendly,” Jock says.

We drive to Sunset. The wave there breaks on a long set of reefs far from shore, and it is handling this swell beautifully. Two-story peaks stand against the sky, and then a long clean wall roars toward the channel. Dozens of people are watching from the highway, but there are only a few surfers out. My heart hammers. This is obviously the spot. I start changing. Jock does not.

“You’re not going out?”

Jock looks miserable. “No, I’m going to run some errands. I feel emotionally wounded.” He had a difficult conversation that morning, apparently, with Pia Stern, his longtime girlfriend. Pia, who lives in San Diego, is a painter and an art teacher. She and Jock met in the nineties, when she was teaching at the University of Hawaii. They have never lived together. They fly back and forth when they can. “We’re very attached, very close, but I don’t have a name for it,” Pia told me.

Jock knows something about long distance. His father, even before leaving the family, spent much of his life at sea. While the kids were small, he worked as a marine construction supervisor in Micronesia. Noëlle recalls a dashing figure. “He could dance the tango and the merengue,” she says. “He was a charmer, a raconteur. Good tennis player, good golfer. He looked so good in a uniform. He was a man’s man, and a ladies’ man.”

Jock idolized his father. He often brings him up, reminiscing about the time he came and took Jock out of school to surf. That only happened once. Pia thinks that John got a pass partly because he was absent. If young Jock, who was headstrong, had clashes with authority, that usually meant with Audrey—John “was never around to play the bad guy.”

Jock quotes Pia often, and seems in awe of her. But, Pia told me, “I’m uncomfortable when he puts me on a pedestal.” This is a theme with Jock. He speaks of his mother with reverential affection. He keeps a collection of her handwritten journals. But his view of his father has developed an edge. “He treated Mom more like a girlfriend than a wife,” he told me. “He had girlfriends everywhere. Really, he was just another selfish surfer.”

At Sunset, Jock offers me a sleek-looking 8'0" to ride. I can’t believe I’m doing this alone. But I do it—not well. The waves are magnificent. The bigger ones stand up, feathering in a light wind, and concentrate a frightening amount of power at their apex when they break. A pro surfer could shred these waves on a tiny high-performance board—stand-up barrels, g-force turns, roundhouse cutbacks—but in this small crowd the people getting the best waves are on enormous boards, ten feet, maybe eleven feet long. A short, strong woman in a tank top picks off a number of beauties, riding one of the longest boards I’ve ever seen. She’s got the spot wired.

I miss every wave I paddle for—shrugged off. This board’s not big enough for me to catch waves out where the longboarders sit, so I move in closer to shore. I’m preparing for a later takeoff, but when I paddle over a swell I find myself right in front of an eight-foot set that’s already breaking. I’m smack in the impact zone. Surprisingly, I enjoy it. I stay above water as long as I can to watch the other surfers’ rides—the huge drops, the screaming walls. I bail my board late and get obliterated. Long, sobering hold-downs but still several glorious, gasping visions.

Jock used to own Sunset. He surfed it twice this size with matchless style—taking off behind the peak, back-dooring the tallest part of a huge wave, side-slipping in the barrel. Could he surf it now, in these conditions, on an 8'0"? I’m not sure. He obviously wasn’t inspired to try. The beatings are fairly heavy, I can attest. I’m pleased to have survived.

We all slow down, we all age out. It’s humbling, or worse, to admit that you can no longer keep up with the young guns at the top breaks, that you need to look for lesser spots—less intense, less competitive, less exciting. I find it difficult, but for a surfer of Jock’s stature the down-slide is truly precipitous. He never talks about it. He is so closely focussed on the waves at any given moment, on the possibilities for joy that they present, that the regret-filled long perspective—the differences between these waves and those he tackled in his prime—seems like a foolish distraction.

I heard Dave Rastovich, a superb pro surfer, contrast Jock with the “grumpy old dude who wishes it was yesteryear”—the inevitable guy who grumbles about the days when it wasn’t so crowded and, hell, even the waves were better. Jock was the antithesis, “always vibrant and always buzzing,” he said. I couldn’t argue with that. He still wanted to surf well, and wanted to look good as he surfed, but I have never heard him fret, even in a sidelong way, about his lost relevance in high-performance surfing. He still likes to compete—in the “old guys’ division,” in local North Shore contests. Last year, he took second at Haleiwa.

And he keeps the rabid surfer’s close eye on the weather, studying not just the charts but the skies to the west. He has a lookout spot among the ruins of an old Hawaiian temple near his place, on Pupukea Heights. It’s high above the ocean. You can really see the angle of the swell. “See those clouds out there? That’s Kauai.” Nearly eighty miles of ocean separate Kauai and Oahu. “I don’t know,” he says, looking up. “Wind’s kind of kapakahi .” That means crossed up.

Jock, after many false starts, is off to see Pia. To prepare, he goes to see a barber who works out of her house near Sunset. He’s given her a ton of avocados, so it’s a discount haircut. He comes out looking like a boy. Jock, for a world-class athlete, has always had a delicate head and neck, and this haircut makes me want to protect him from the world.

Before he goes, we surf Chun’s one more time, and he gives me a wave-judgment tip that I could not have imagined previously. It’s a rising swell, and the sets are starting to produce a lovely peak right next to the channel. The crowd has moved over there, but Jock instead points toward the horizon: “Let’s go, Bill.” I see nothing, but I follow. He’s paddling fast, moving way out, away from the crowd. Eventually, a wave appears—easily the biggest of the day, standing up far outside. It’s physically impossible, I believe, that Jock could have known that wave was coming. But he gets there in plenty of time, right to the heart of the peak, and spins. Everybody else in the water is caught inside by at least forty yards. People are shouting in dismay and disbelief. It’s a demonstration of basically incomprehensible mastery.

Then Jock does something truly weird. He jumps up and goes left. Chun’s is a right-hander—the channel is on the west side of the reef. But Jock sets out east, from the main peak across a very long wall. I punch through the lip near the takeoff and turn to watch. The wave runs off for fifty, sixty yards, no sign of Jock, until he finally comes sailing over the shoulder, way down by Piddlies someplace. It is one of the most counterintuitive things I’ve seen in a lifetime of surfing.

Later, going through the rituals of hosing, drying, standing on certain rags, in deep-shadowed twilight beside his childhood home, I ask him how he knew that set was coming.

“Didn’t you see that six-man out there?” He’s talking about an outrigger canoe that was passing Chun’s, maybe half a mile offshore. I certainly never saw it—a tiny distant figure in the afternoon glare of the ocean’s surface. Neither did I see that it disappeared from view for an unusually long time. That meant, to Jock, that there was an unusually large set approaching, still a minute away. “You gotta keep your eyes open, Bill.” ♦

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6 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This Week

Whether you’re a casual moviegoer or an avid buff, our reviewers think these films are worth knowing about.

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By The New York Times

CRITIC’S PICK

He’s got killer charisma.

Gary (played by Glen Powell) is a reserved philosophy professor who finds himself posing as a hit man for a sting operation in this Richard Linklater comedy. While in disguise, he falls for one of his clients (Adria Arjona).

From our review:

If I see a movie more delightful than “Hit Man” this year, I’ll be surprised. It’s the kind of romp people are talking about when they say that “they don’t make them like they used to”: It’s romantic, sexy, hilarious, satisfying and a genuine star-clinching turn for Glen Powell, who’s been having a moment for about two years now. It’s got the cheeky verve of a 1940s screwball rom-com in a thoroughly contemporary (and slightly racier) package. I’ve seen it twice, and a huge grin plastered itself across my face both times.

In theaters. Read the full review .

It’s worse than Mondays.

‘the garfield movie’.

The grouchy tabby gets another big-screen adaptation, this time following an unexpected reunion with his father.

The film, directed by Mark Dindal, is an inert adaptation that mostly tries to skate by on its namesake. In other words, it’s a Garfield movie that strangely doesn’t feel as if Garfield as we know him is really there at all. Part of this can be attributed to the voice — Chris Pratt, an overly spunky casting choice that was doomed from the start — but there’s also a built-in defect to the very concept of the big-screen Garfield treatment. An animated, animal-centric children’s movie tends to require a narrative structure of action-packed adventure — the antithesis of Garfield the cat’s raison d’être.

An A.I. movie that sticks to the script.

In this sci-fi thriller, Jennifer Lopez plays Atlas, a data analyst with a distaste for artificial intelligence, who must help capture an A.I. robot that wants to destroy humanity.

Lopez, who was also a producer on the movie, flings herself into the role with abandon, the kind of performance that’s especially impressive given that she’s largely by herself throughout. … At times “Atlas” feels like pure pastiche, and it looks, in a fashion we’re getting used to seeing on the streamers, kind of cheap, dark, plasticky and fake, particularly in the big action sequences. Science fiction often earns its place in memory by envisioning something new and startling — but with “Atlas,” we’ve seen it all before.

Watch on Netflix . Read the full review .

The sorrow and the surreal.

‘kidnapped: the abduction of edgardo mortara’.

Based on a true story, this film follows a Jewish child, Edgardo Mortara, in 19th-century Italy who is kidnapped by the papal state and raised as Roman Catholic.

The director, Marco Bellocchio, anchors the period with a somber visual elegance and employs surreal gestures to tease out the psychological and spiritual aspects of the tragedy. Political cartoons lambasting Pope Pius IX come to life through animation. During an especially sorrowful moment in the boy’s confinement, one of the figures of the crucified Christ in the Roman dormitory for child converts takes leave of his cross with the help of little Edgardo.

Shantay, you stay.

In Montreal, Simon (Théodore Pellerin) pursues a career as a drag queen and contends with two thorny relationships: a destructive crush on a fellow performer and a reunion with his absentee mother.

“Solo” is a subtle snapshot into a gay man’s profound yet familiar upheavals. Simon’s drag spectacles may be intentionally fierce and operatic, but there’s something refreshing about this drama’s intimate scale and lack of interest in sweeping tragedies, especially in the context of queer cinema.

Inspirational, not necessarily insightful

A man who endured a traumatic childhood during the Chinese Cultural Revolution becomes a world-renowned eye surgeon in this fictionalized account of the life of Dr. Ming Wang.

As is the custom with inspirational medical movies, however, the new film “Sight,” directed by Andrew Hyatt, leans hard into uplift — it provides only the narrative-necessary minimum of the science. Wang’s achievement in developing innovative technology is central to one of the stories here, yes. But the dominating narrative is one of personal growth.

Compiled by Kellina Moore .

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Darwin’s antithesis revisited – a zoosemiotic perspective on expressing emotions in animals and animal cartoon characters

2019, Sign Systems Studies

In the animation and design of cartoon characters, animators have often turned to the study of biological theories and observation of human actors and animals to capture lifelike movements and emotions more successfully. Charles Darwin’s principle of antithesis, as one of the principles he considered to be responsible for the expression of emotions in animals, would seem to be of distinctive importance in the development of animation. By revisiting Darwin’s original idea in the context of the principles of animation formulated by Thomas and Johnston, we are able to assess its application and relevance in the expressions of emotions in cartoon animal characters. The article concentrates on the emotive function of animal social communication as outlined in zoosemiotics, while taking into account that the expressions of animal characters are directed at the viewer. The principle of antithesis, as a descriptive tool, aids us in considering the diversity of modalities used simultaneously...

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American Psychologist

Ursula Hess

In his book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin (1872/1965) defended the argument that emotion expressions are evolved and adaptive (at least at some point in the past) and serve an important communicative function. The ideas he developed in his book had an important impact on the field and spawned rich domains of inquiry. This article presents Darwin's three principles in this area and then discusses some of the research topics that developed out of his theoretical vision. In particular, the focus is on five issues--(a) the question of what emotion expressions express, (b) the notion of basic emotions, (c) the universality of emotion expressions, (d) the question of emotion prototypes, and (e) the issue of animal emotions--all of which trace their roots to Darwin's discussion of his first two principles.

The expression of emotions in men and animals

reinaldo pedreira

Paper of Charles Darwin A peça musical Os Saltimbancos tem uma notável característica a analogia das emoções do homem com aquela dos animais. É o trabalho orgânico na Natureza e na Sociedade. A possível confusão (sobretudo causada pelo materialismo espontâneo de Darwin que considerava o Belo Natural superior ao Belo artístico e social). Nesta peça as diferenças de "personalidade" dos animais (O jumento "burro de carga", a gata do proletariado andrajoso e marginal, a galinha manipulada como um meio de um ovo produzir outro ovo e o cachorro, baba-ovo fiel do patrão) são superadas na luta de seus objetivos comuns e contra seus inimigos.

Paulo Jesus

One of the most striking applications of Darwinian principles resides in the evolutionary account of expression of emotions. The main purpose of this paper is to ask some fundamental questions concerning this realm of Darwinian investigations and its implicit or explicit legacy in contemporary psychology of emotions, which appears inhabited by the essential tension between the primacy of embodiment (from James to Damasio) and that of cognitive mediation (from Peirce to Lazarus). One should ask again: what is an emotion? Is it reducible to a bodily expression or is there any qualitative difference between emotion and expression? Why do emotions belong to the phenomena of life? How do the grammar of life and the grammar of culture interact in emotional expressions? What is the ―truth ‖ of Darwin’s principles on expressions and what degree of coherence can be detected when one attempts at integrating the theory of emotions in the larger picture of the evolution of life forms and cultur...

"The history of animation is interlaced with the use of anthropomorphism and zoomorphism as a device for creating popular characters and narratives. In the ‘post-modern’ critique of animal representation in art, there has been a largely negative debate surrounding anthropomorphism and the symbolic use of animal forms; echoing theories formulated for scientific studies in biosciences, social anthropology and social geography. How, then, can animation be understood as a relevant creative medium for investigating relationships between humans and non-human animals in the modern world? The first section of the paper will identify a range of anthropomorphic forms and show how these are present in character design and narration. Links will be made to an understanding of human psychology (Winnicott, 1971;Langer, 1953); and the development of storytelling ( Boyd, 2009; Ingold, 1994 ). This will include an exploration of ‘the metaphor’ as a literary and visual device capable of bringing richness to the language of moving image work (Fauconnier and Turner, 2002). Moving on, the role that animation has played in a present day discourse of ecological and socio-biological issues will be highlighted and related to modern day discourses. In this way, the unique qualities that animation has as an expressive art form will be shown to be eminently suited to portraying the diversity of experiences that human and non-human animals share. "

Eric Jenkins

Tânia Regina Vizachri

Animated features have a high appeal due to their technological craft, creativity and moral message. They have a significant influence on people’s imaginations. It is interesting to note that the protagonists of these movies are usually anthropomorphised animals. Adults usually understand these animal representations as metaphors for our society or humanity. So, we can ask ourselves: Is anthropomorphising ethically valid? What does it show about our culture? What about our relationship with other animals? Animated film can bring discourses of either reproduction or subversion of animal exploitation to viewers’ attention. This contradiction constitutes a Marxist dialectic because the films show us the different interests surrounding the human–animal relationship and seek a way to overcome this contradiction. But just like myths, such films seek to overcome the problem using the imaginary. Unfortunately, this is far from a full solution in a real or even symbolic sense.

Darwin’s book on emotions, The expression of the emotions in man and animals (1872), elaborates on the main conclusion of The descent of man (1871), that “man is descended from some less highly organised form”, through the application of evolutionary principles to a particular and crucial chapter of human bio-psychology, the chapter of emotions. The focus on expressive behaviour, rather than emotional states, proceeds obviously from Darwin’s empirical standpoint as a field naturalist, but it does not allow one to take a fully behaviourist reading of his theory of emotions. Indeed, for Darwin, emotions are states of mind, and the so-called expressions are originally nothing but the serviceable actions provoked by those states of mind in order to find relief or gratification. Therefore, the general natural intentionality of emotions consists in unleashing adaptive changes of action. In other words, emotions are essentially proactive or motivational; and their functional role is to reg...

Andy Buchanan

Sinem Serap

The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals is Charles Darwin's third major work of evolutionary theory, following On The Origin of Species (1859) and The Descent of Man (1871).

Continental Philosophy Review

Maxine Sheets-Johnstone

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Anaesthesia cartoons and comics

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Anaesthesia Cartoon #1

"We're waiting for the anesthetic to wear off. Why don't you have a seat in the waiting room until he comes down?"

Anaesthesia Cartoon #2

"Anesthesia? We'd prefer not to risk adding to the drug epidemic, so just bite down on this stick."

Anaesthesia cartoon #3.

"It's not a very good simile but you'll be like an evening spread out against the sky."

Anaesthesia cartoon #4.

It's a text from the patient. He says 'more anesthetic, please.'"

Anaesthesia cartoon #5.

"He's taking selfies again. More anesthesia!"

Anaesthesia cartoon #6.

"...and how about you, Wellington? Does this smell funny to you?"

Anaesthesia cartoon #7.

Early Anaesthesia

Anaesthesia cartoon #8.

Ether Island

Anaesthesia cartoon #9.

'You say he needs 'ventilatory support' - are we talking boxers or Y-fronts?'

Anaesthesia cartoon #10.

Things you don't want to hear or why they make sure you're asleep

Anaesthesia cartoon #11.

'Wait ‘til you see the video I uploaded of you coming out of anesthesia. It's HILARIOUS!'

Anaesthesia cartoon #12.

'The anesthetic should be strong enough, but I've put this on just to be on the safe side.'

Anaesthesia cartoon #13.

"You'll be awake during the entire procedure. The anesthesiologist is on vacation."

Anaesthesia cartoon #14.

Principles of Anaesthesia.

Anaesthesia cartoon #15.

'Would you like to take advantage of our 'painless dentistry option'?'

Anaesthesia cartoon #16.

"Oh, I thought you knew; the Groupon deal doesn't include anaesthesia."

Anaesthesia cartoon #17.

"You'll be awake during the entire procedure. Your HMO won't cover the Anesthesia."

Anaesthesia cartoon #18.

"The procedure begins with a local anesthetic to your wallet."

Anaesthesia cartoon #19.

"The bad news is that we've run out of anaesthetic..."

Anaesthesia cartoon #20.

"Take note, Clammerhorn. The yellow tank is helium."

Anaesthesia cartoon #21.

"Any chance that was you who just screamed in excruciating pain?"

Anaesthesia cartoon #22.

"No, a topical anesthetic isn't something you must discuss a lot."

Anaesthesia cartoon #23.

"I'm just the anesthesiologist."

Anaesthesia cartoon #24.

Man in a Coma with a 'While You Were Out' note.

Anaesthesia cartoon #25.

"You'll be kept awake throughout the operation."

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