For Helen Vendler and Stephen Booth, among others, the rhetoric of enslavement is ironic: it highlights the element of exaggeration in the speaker's rhetoric, thus hinting that those emotions spring more from self-pity than from justified hurt.
Helen Vendler and Stephen Booth, along with other scholars, argue that the use of the rhetoric of enslavement is ironic because it reveals a tendency for the speaker to exaggerate their emotional state, suggesting that their feelings are rooted in self-pity rather than justified pain.