Reagan's "Challenger Address": A Three-Page Rhetorical Analysis

Evan Layne Johnson Reagan’s “Challenger Address”: A Pentadic Criticism This analysis applies Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic pentad to Ronald Reagan’s “Challenger Address.” First, I explain the rhetor’s construction of the pentadic terms, and then I describe the dominant ratio in the speech: agency-agent. The expressed purpose of President Reagan’s speech is “mourning and remembering” the seven astronauts who died on the space craft. However, the implicit act to which Reagan calls the nation is continued space exploration in the near future. “The future doesn’t belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we’ll continue to follow them.” Since the crew members are dead, we cannot literally “continue to follow them,” but symbolically, as a nation, Reagan asks us to act by going where those astronauts were trying to take us. Reagan says “explore,” and “exploration” in the speech and that root-word is a good metonymy for the act of the speech: continued exploration of space. Reagan’s constructions of scene and purpose are intertwined in the text. The scene is simply space—the final frontier. Whereas the oceans and the western United States were the former frontiers for Europeans and Americans, now space is the scene in which we can fulfill our implicit national purpose of “discovery” and “expanding man’s horizons.” Our last opportunity to expand America’s frontier is in space. Now that I’ve discussed act (exploring), scene (the last frontier), and purpose (discovery), I will discuss who Reagan constructs as the new “pioneers,” or agents, in the national drama. The former agents are the seven dead space shuttle astronauts. Those agents are twice esteemed for how they “serve(d)” the country, even unto self-sacrifice. But their families “bear” the “full impact of the tragedy,” not the “nation.” In the future orientation of Reagan’s rhetorical drama, the agents must still be alive. Agents Reagan focuses on, in part, are the employees in “anguish” at NASA. The true agents for future acts of exploration, though, are the “schoolchildren of 1 Evan Layne Johnson America who were watching live . . .” These children, I argue, are Reagan’s future pioneers. This realization helps explain the original public relations move to include a teacher on the mission and to encourage viewership among grade school kids across America. Politicians say politics is about securing a better future for our children, and the rhetorical construction of schoolchildren as agents and future pioneers in this speech aligns with that maxim. Finally, Reagan offers us the agency with which schoolchildren (agents and future pioneers) will continue to explore (act) and discover (purpose) in the last frontier (scene): the agency of remembering. The nation is told, “Today is a day for mourning and remembering.” We mourn the deaths now, but as we move forward, true agents must remember the fallen heroes and use their memory as inspiration. If we use the agency of remembering, we will gain courage, since it was “perhaps” since we had “forgotten” the pitfalls of flight that we had lost “courage” in the first place. Second, if we used the agency of remembering, we can stay the course and explore more of space, since “perhaps” the cause of this accident was that we had “grown used to the idea of space” and “we forgot” the novelty and danger of real space flight. Remembering helps us become “brave” and keep our mission. If the children remember what they saw, even though it was “painful,” they can repurpose their mourning into inspirational memory and become productive public servants, like the fallen astronauts. Due to the prevalence of memory discourse in this speech and the invocation to “remember,” not “forget,” I argue the featured term in Reagan’s dramatistic construction of the speech is agency. Reagan foregrounds the agency of remembering in order to refigure the mourning audience, especially schoolchildren, into active pioneers who can make new discoveries in the frontier of space. Despite being a fairly uncommon ratio, I suggest the featured ratio in this speech is agency-agent. Remember, schoolchildren; remember. 2 Evan Layne Johnson Reagan’s “Challenger Address”: Act: Continued Exploration Purpose: Discovery of new horizons The Pentad Agency: Remembering the perils and novelty of space exploration Scene: Space, the final frontier Agents: Our Future Pioneers: American Schoolchildren Primary Ratio: Agency to Agents; Remember→Schoolchildren 3