Rhetorical Elements - "On Dumpster Diving"

The underlying purpose in the piece “On Dumpster Diving” is conveyed through Lars Eighner’s tone and ironic elements throughout to convey his lifestyle as a homeless man, and how it is necessary for him to rely on the privileged for basic necessities such as food.

His clearly didactic tone emphasizes that he is not, in fact, embarrassed of the lifestyle he lives. Instead, he embraces it, all the while, critiquing the privileged and their snobbish and lazy outlooks on life. A recurring motif throughout the piece is “canned goods.” Throughout the beginning of the piece, he discusses canned goods to a great extent, illustrating how to assess if particular canned goods are ok to consume. However, later in the piece he discusses canned good in the context of college students. He reveals that his experience at a dumpster near the campus was truly eye-opening; the fact that students were throwing out canned goods demonstrates the irony of how these privileged students are wasting perfectly good food which is benefiting the not-so-privileged homeless people. He ultimately concludes that although many people view him with derogatory adjectives such as a dirty, valueless, and poor, they themselves are not aware of how wasteful and poor (in a substandard way) they actually are. His purpose is clearly established at the end when he states that he is “sorry for them” (Eighner 95). By doing this, he directly criticizes the rich, conveying that they may be rich with wealth, but not rich in knowledge and self-worth.