pathos
What is Pathos? Definition, Usage, and Literary Examples
Pathos Definition
Pathos (PAY-thohs) is an element in rhetoric or artistic expression that elicits feelings of sympathy, compassion, pity, or sorrow from an audience. One way to remember the meaning of pathos is to think of the word pathetic. Although pathetic contains some negative connotations in slang, the word’s primary meaning is “arousing pity, sorrow, grief.” So, things that are pathetic contain pathos.
The word pathos was first used in English in the 1660s and derives from the Greek pathos, which means “suffering, feeling, emotion, calamity.”
Pathos as a Mode of Persuasion
You might have heard the phrase “People are ruled more by their hearts than by their heads.” Because emotions play a significant role in the decisions people make and the actions they take, pathos is a powerful persuasive tool.
In Rhetoric, his 4th-century BCE treatise on the effective use of language, Aristotle cites pathos as one of the three primary tools of persuasion, alongside ethos and logos.
- Ethos relies upon the credibility and reputation of the speaker or writer. The audience is convinced by the rhetorician’s trustworthiness and breadth of knowledge.
- Logos utilizes logic and reason to sway an audience. Facts, data, and citations from credible experts are all aspects of logos.
- Pathos is an appeal to the audience’s emotions. Speakers and writers must utilize pathos to establish emotional connections with their audience, which will help sway them.
While ethos and logos rely upon credibility and logic, pathos blatantly utilizes emotions to persuade the audience to adopt the speaker’s position. Aristotle particularly stressed using pathos during the introduction and the conclusion of an argument for the greatest persuasive effect. He also pointed out that one must always understand the context and social situation to effectively utilize emotions in an argument.
Why Writers Use Pathos
Writers use pathos to arouse strong emotion in their readers, as well as to persuade. Sometimes those feelings are meant to elicit agreement with an author’s position and even incite action from the audience. At other times, authors use pathos simply to affect their readers emotionally, causing them to be moved in powerful ways. Pathos can also be an effective plot device; characters within a story may employ pathos to convince other characters to take certain actions or support various beliefs or causes.
Pathos Outside of Literature
Because pathos is a mode of persuasion, we frequently encounter it in real-life areas that rely on convincing an audience―particularly advertising and politics.
Advertising
In advertising, pathos is frequently used to influence consumers so they will direct their money towards the goods and services advertised.
Coca-Cola’s “Open Happiness” campaign originally focused on evoking feelings of joy and optimism in connection to drinking this soda. Later, the brand pivoted their ad campaign to a series that focused on creating empathy, hoping consumers would be persuaded to both purchase the product and associate the company with an ethical and nurturing worldview.
Other advertisements tug on audiences’ heartstrings by evoking feelings of pity, sorrow, and compassion. To convince viewers to donate money, nonprofits like UNICEF often show images of starving children, and the ASPCA infamously pairs photographs and video footage of suffering dogs and cats with Sarah McLachlan’s poignant song “Angel.”
Politics
Politicians and activists use pathos to sway the public into voting for them or supporting their policy platform or positions. For example, in Winston Churchill’s famous “Their Finest Hour” speech, he reminds his audience of the suffering of those already conquered by the Nazis to help convince his citizens that they must keep fighting. Dr. Martin Luther King also utilized pathos in his famous “I Have A Dream” speech when he highlighted the suffering of Black Americans and the necessity of racial equality.
More recently, former Georgia House Representative Stacey Abrams utilized pathos in the Democratic response to Donald Trump’s State of the Union address when she highlighted equal access to voting as embodying “the values our brave men and women in uniform and our veterans risked their lives to defend.”
Examples of Pathos in Literature
1. Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities
When the cynical, dissolute drunkard Sydney Carton chooses to sacrifice himself for his lookalike Charles Darnay, his internal monologue just before death is full of pathos:
I see a beautiful city and a brilliant people rising form this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats, through long years to come, I see the evil of this …gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out. I see the lives for which I lay down my life, peaceful, useful, prosperous and happy, in that England which I shall see no more…I see her, an old woman, weeping for me on the anniversary of this day… It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
Carton’s focus on the future of the woman he loves and the man she loves, as well as the country he will never see again, fills the reader with sorrow and compassion for him.
2. Hafizah Geter, “Testimony”
In her debut collection, Geter wrote a series of poems for victims of police violence, such as Michael Brown and Sandra Bland. In the poem for Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old boy who was killed by police who believed the toy gun he held was real, Geter uses dramatic monologue, telling what happened from Rice’s own point of view:
After they shot me they tackled my sister.
The sound of her knees hitting the sidewalk
made my stomach ache. It was a bad pain.
like when you love someone
and they lie to you.
This poem is also written as an apostrophe, in the form of a letter to then-President Barack Obama. Geter creates a powerful sense of pathos by using the diction of a young boy and the scenario of that boy speaking from death to the president he admired.
3. Randall Horton, Hook
In Horton’s searing and impassioned memoir, he recounts his earlier years as a criminal and drug addict. In the section titled “Father, Please Forgive Me, 1999,” he writes about how his father argued for him as a character witness during his parole hearing:
[m]y father placed his dignity before the court, and with teary rivulets coming steady now and his voice trying to stay proud, he begged the judge…Please, please give me my boy back. His is a life worth saving.
Horton’s father uses pathos to try and arouse the judge’s sympathy, pity, and compassion.
Further Resources about Pathos
Richard Nordquist wrote an engaging article exploring the use of pathos in rhetoric.
Studiobinder has a helpful article and accompanying video about the use of pathos in advertising.
J.F. Pyre wrote a lovely exploration of Shakespeare’s use of pathos.