Columbine Motives

6 Pages 1452 Words

Analysis of Motives
“What is involved when we say what people are doing and why they are doing it?” Kenneth Burke in, “Grammar of Motives” offers us a way to analyze different people or events and why they did it. Through the idea of Pentad we can further analyze things to cover all aspects of it. Pentad includes five principle terms. They are: Act, Scene, Agent, Agency, and Purpose. We can use this to analyze motives behind certain events. The act is what event actually took place. The scene deals with the situation or place where the event occurred. The person or kind of person who performed the act is the agent. Agency is what means or instruments he used. And last but not least is the purpose. In this paper I will discuss different articles that deal with the Columbine scandal and the ways people view this incident through the use of Pentad.
Burke argues that each person who looks at a certain way using this pentad will have a different way of looking at it. For example when people look at the Columbine shootings, you can rarely find articles that are similar to each other. Why is that? We were created with our own mind. Not one of us has lived identical lives to anyone else. People
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develop views on things throughout a collection of study and experience building inside us so therefore it is all different. Earlier in the year we read a piece from Burke “Terministic Screens” ; this talked about experiences and how each event or experience in our life that we encounter, we develop a screen in our head. A photographer uses different lenses and not one lens is the same. You could be looking at the exact same thing through that lens but the way you see it in you mind is different. The same thing comes into play here. My pentad for looking at an event is not like anyone other person’s pentad. Another aspect on the pentad deals with ratios. We use ratios to help us analyze articles. So...