Franklin Shepard Makes His Case
The rhetoric of "Growing Up" — and why it fails
What does it mean to argue perfectly for a false position? Not to lie, exactly—but to construct a case whose logic is sound and whose premises are not. This is a particular kind of self-deception, and it has its own aesthetics: the careful vocabulary, the reasonable tone, the sense of a man thinking things through rather than talking himself into something.
Alone at his piano, Franklin Shepard begins to make his case—carefully, even eloquently—for why the life he has chosen was not a betrayal of the life he once wanted:
So, old friends,
Don’t you see we can have it all,
Moving on,
Getting out of the past?
Solving dreams,
Not just trusting them,
Taking dreams,
Readjusting them,
Growing up,
Growing up...
The Frank of “Growing Up” is rhetorically sophisticated and genuinely introspective. The tragedy, of course, is that, despite addressing his friends, he speaks only to himself. Let’s look more closely at Frank’s argument, why it fails, and—crucially—whether it ever could have succeeded.
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The Rhetoric of Having It All
Our quoted passage of Frank’s argument begins with a classic rhetorical move: establishing common ground. “So, old friends” presumes a conversation already underway, a Mary and a Charley who are present, attentively listening. In Kenneth Burke’s dramatistic theory of rhetoric, effective persuasion requires “identification.” The speaker must align themselves with the audience’s values and identity. Frank attempts this: we are old friends, we can have it all, we are in this together.
“Don’t you see we can have it all?” is a question that performs as assertion. Rhetorically, it’s brilliant, positioning disagreement as a failure of vision rather than a difference of values. If Mary and Charley refuse, they’re simply not seeing clearly. The promise (“we can have it all”) anticipates the objection Frank knows they’d raise: that what he’s doing requires sacrifice, compromise, selling out. No, he insists, we can have all of it. Success and integrity. Commercial viability and artistic merit. The old dreams and the new reality.
But consider what “having it all” actually means in Frank’s formulation: