Roger Ebert Voice

Roger Ebert: The Essential Man by Chris Jones discusses how a huge movie critic who used is voice for everything he did, now has to write it all down because he has lost his voice (and most of his jaw and chin) to cancer. Chris Jones uses voice in his writing to convey Ebert's literal struggle with voice and how to maintain it. Through a clever writing style, Jones succeeds in writing this beautiful portrait of a voiceless man trying to keep his voice.

 Chris Jones does a particularly good job of conveying the everyday life of Roger Ebert and his wife Chaz through voice. He does this through starting out in a third person omniscient and over the course of the essay coming into a third person limited.  I find this to be extremely clever and cool in that I see it as much like the life of Roger Ebert and his actual voice. Ebert started his career with a voice that seemed to boom. Jones says that "he lived his life through a microphone" and that is how Ebert came to be. Over time, he slowly lost this actual voice and began to have to write everything down. It became a  much more intricate ordeal and every word he wrote had to have mattered that much more.

Jones also uses dialogue throughout this piece in a very clever way. He uses conversations between Ebert and his wife, Chaz. What is clever is that Ebert isn't actually physically speaking, he is writing it all down, either on a spiral note book or typing it into a computer for the computer to read aloud. Jones uses Ebert's writing as a voice and his computer's voice, as a voice. Moreover, Ebert's rudimentary sign language also takes a part in the dialogue between Ebert and Chaz. Through this dialogue, the audience is more drawn into what it must be like to not have a voice and still speak.