Outside Reading: Reflective Essay

http://www.mcsweeneys.net/links/monologues/9kavner.html
"I Want to Defend Myself and this Shirt I'm Wearning Inside Out" by Lucas Kavner
January 9, 2011

Kavner had taken a very angry tone throughout all of this essay - somebody is making fun of his shirt!  Or at least, he thinks that somebody is making fun of his shirt.  He uses swear words, italics, and exclamation marks to emphasize his angry, so that everybody knows that he does not appreciate the people who are insulting him.  But the reader never actually knows if anybody is insulting Kavner, or if it is all in his imagination.  At one point, he says that a girl is checking him out, and he'll "BRB."  A couple of lines later, he says "She has a boyfriend, alright? ...It wasn't because of the shirt. ...You are all being so ridiculous right now I can't even believe it."  This brings about an overly defensive and insulted tone, and makes the reader wonder if anybody is actually making fun of him, or if it is all his imagination.
The angry and defensive tone gives me a mental picture of Kavner being a paranoid young man who believes that everybody wants to make him miserable, and is therefore making himself miserable.  He is constantly making excuses for himself because he seems to think that he has to, while at the same time he is giving others an excuse to laugh at his shirt.  Even in the title, the first thing he says is "I Want To Defend Myself" and then he tells the world that yes, he is wearing his shirt inside out.  This is a social commentary upon whiners, and those who are insulted by everything.
The tone is this essay would not be appropriate for an AP essay at all because it is written in first person, the tone is quite casual and angry, the vocabulary used is immature and inappropriate in many cases, and the entire essay is written in a poor style of an AP essay.  As a reflective essay, however, the tone works very well, and he succeeds at his goal of commenting upon society.
A strength of Kavner's essay is his ability to effectively tell the reader what he is thinking, and what the purpose of this essay is.  There is no question in the readers head that the tone is angry, and that Kavner is showing a rather immature and easily offended man.  The weakness goes hand in hand with the strength, though.  In order to express his anger and his believe that he has been insulted, he had to use inappropriate diction and had to take a casual tone.
Kavner uses quite a bit of rhetoric in this essay.  One of the most commonly seen is the punctuation - he poses many questions to the reader, and often uses exclamation points to get his point across.  He also uses exaggeration, such as when he said "So sue me, alright?  Sue me!"