Breaking Down the Rhetorical Moves in The Great Influenza
You open the book to find a well-researched history of the 1918 flu pandemic, but when you're asked to do a rhetorical analysis, you need to shift from reading for content to reading for method. The Great Influenza by John M. Barry is a dense work that uses several rhetorical strategies to build credibility and guide the reader through complex scientific history. Understanding how those strategies work is the whole point of the assignment. A rhetorical analysis of this book focuses on how Barry persuades rather than just what he argues. He's not writing a textbook. He's writing narrative nonfiction, and that distinction matters because it changes what tools he has at his disposal and how he deploys them. Start with his most obvious move: credibility through documentation. Barry spent years tracking down primary sources, interviewing survivors, and visiting archives across the country. He mentions this process throughout the book. When he describes spending months trying to track down a single telegram or tracking down the records of a town health officer who died in 1919, he's building what Aristotle would call ethos. He's telling you, quietly, that this information survived decades of neglect and he recovered it. That's persuasive in its own right, separate from the argument.
The second major strategy is narrative framing. Barry doesn't dump you into 1918 and leave you there. He structures the book around individual characters — Dr. Walter Gorgas in Havana, Dr. Joseph Kinyoun at the Hygiene Laboratory, doctors in Philadelphia and Seattle. By anchoring the story in specific people making decisions under pressure, he makes the historical events feel immediate and the stakes feel concrete. This is pathos, but it's used carefully. He doesn't melodramatize. He lets the facts carry the weight and places you beside the person living them. Then there's the comparative structure. One of the most powerful rhetorical choices Barry makes is running parallel case studies. The Philadelphia vs. Seattle comparison is the most famous example. He shows two cities of similar size taking opposite approaches to public health interventions and tracks the divergent outcomes. This isn't just good history. It's a controlled experiment set up by reality, and Barry is essentially saying: here is the evidence, draw your own conclusion. That approach gives readers a sense of having discovered something rather than being told something. The scientific reasoning also plays a role. Barry walks the reader through how scientists in 1918 did or did not understand that a virus was responsible. He shows the gap between what they knew and what they had the tools to prove. This rhetorical choice does double duty: it explains why the response was inadequate while also modeling the scientific method for a general audience. He's teaching without sounding like he's teaching.
Now, here's where things get trickier in practice. I've graded dozens of these analyses over the years, and the most common mistake is listing rhetorical devices without connecting them to the author's purpose. A student might say "Barry uses ethos" and then quote a passage about his research. That's not an analysis. The analysis requires explaining why Barry chooses to foreground his research process at that particular moment and how it shifts the reader's trust in what follows. The device and the purpose have to be linked in a way that shows understanding, not just identification. Another pitfall is treating the book as purely a history text. The rhetorical analysis isn't asking whether Barry's historical claims are accurate. It's asking how he constructs those claims persuasively. Those are different questions. You can have a strong rhetorical analysis even if you're not an expert on influenza history. One specific problem I run into frequently: students conflate tone with rhetorical strategy. Barry's tone is measured and often grave, especially in the later chapters. That's important to note, but it's descriptive, not analytical. The analysis comes when you explain how that measured tone serves his argument — specifically how it prevents the reader from dismissing his account as sensationalist and instead positions him as a reliable guide through a chaotic subject.
Get the Full Details
Here's a practical approach that tends to work. Read through the book once for comprehension. Then read it a second time highlighting moments where Barry seems to be working harder than usual to convince you of something. Those moments are where the rhetoric lives. After that, group those moments by strategy type and look for patterns. Barry doesn't use the same approach in every chapter. The Philadelphia section relies heavily on the comparative structure. The scientific investigation sections lean on ethos and logical reasoning. Noticing which strategy dominates where and why is what separates a surface reading from a real analysis. The book also has a limitation you should be aware of. It was published in 2004, and some of the scientific details have been updated since then. That doesn't weaken the rhetorical analysis — if anything, it's useful to note that Barry was writing with the knowledge available at the time, which is itself a rhetorical condition. His narrative reflects what was known in 2004, not what we know now. If your instructor expects you to engage with that, it's worth mentioning briefly. The core of a solid analysis will focus on ethos, narrative structure, comparative framing, and the balance between scientific explanation and storytelling. Barry's goal is to make a scientific and historical subject accessible without sacrificing accuracy, and the rhetorical choices he makes are designed to support that single aim. Your job is to show how each choice contributes to that goal.
