The Routes of Man: Thesis

In Ted Conover's The Routes of Man, Conover explains why the journey to a destination is as, if not more so, interesting as the destination itself, with stories of him going to various places such as Cuzco and Ladakh. In the book, Conover has examples of rhetorical modes as he tells his story. Narration is the first and easiest rhetorical mode to recognize in this book because he is recounting what had happened in his travels. Description would be the next recognizable rhetorical mode since Conover goes into great detail about specific things that he notices throughout each of his journeys like a sloth he had seen in his travels to Cuzco. Definition is another recurring mode that appears when Conover defines foreign terms in his stories that the reader may not be familiar with like "cuy", which means guinea pig. Conover occasionally uses cause and effect whenever he ponders what effects may come as a result of certain actions, like why logging is illegal in Peru. For example, if a group of loggers were sent to a forest to collect lumber, they would destroy the ecosystem of animals that live there; the loggers would eat the animals for sustenance while they remained at the forest, and the lost trees would mean certain animals would need to relocate from their former homes. A simple example of compare and contrast in The Routes of Man is how in recent times, people want to get mahogany wood from South America, but about 500 years ago, Spanish conquistadors arrived on sail boats to take gold back to their homeland. While there are numerous examples of arguments in the book, one such example Conover makes is why there are no road systems to ease land travel. If there was a road plan in construction it would potentially save the time of many drivers going from point a to point b, but there is also a chance that random guerrillas could hijack the roads and extort the drivers for money or destroy the roads, forcing drivers back to using older roads. Conover has used exemplification in order to describe why a truck driver would be important in South America; a big truck is useful for transporting people in addition to cargo and the drivers are intimately familiar with what roads they should use if something happens to one road. Despite the number of examples rhetorical modes found here, the book does not have recognizable examples of process analysis or division and classification, so there are no noted examples of either category.