Publication Date

5-5-2008

Document Type

Article

Comments

This article was presented by at the National Conference for Undergraduate Research in 2008.

Abstract

President George W. Bush’s second “Republican Party Nomination Acceptance Speech” is an intriguing piece of rhetoric that is discussed in this study. The research question asks how Bush’s rhetoric in this speech exemplifies his use of specific narratives in order to assimilate with the audience. Fisher’s narrative paradigm is used as a rhetorical analysis tool to explore these narratives, looking at their narrative coherence and fidelity and showing how satellites within his speech do not relate to the speech but are aimed at the audience’s feelings. In this study, certain pieces of Bush’s narratives within his nomination acceptance speech were selected and analyzed using Fisher’s narrative paradigm. Each of those pieces are not directly related to the purpose of the speech, but are satellites. The narrative coherence and narrative fidelity were determined in these satellites in order to attempt to discover their purpose and place in the overall speech. The conclusions of this study is that the many arbitrary narratives that President Bush includes in his speech serve the purpose of connecting him with his audience and have both narrative coherence and fidelity with his audience members. Additionally, further research should be done on this specific speech using other rhetorical analysis tools in order to go into even more depth with the narratives.

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