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narrative life of frederick douglass analysis
narrative life of frederick douglass analysis
life of frederick douglass analysis essay
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The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass written by Frederick Douglass himself is a brutally honest portrayal of slavery's dehumanizing capabilities. The style of this famous autobiography can be best described as personal, emotional, and compelling. By writing this narrative, Douglass wants his audience to understand him. He does this by speaking informally like a person would when writing a letter or telling a story to a friend. By clearly establishing his credibility and connecting with his audience, Douglass uses numerous rhetorical devices to argue for the immorality of slavery. Douglass' narrative was groundbreaking because had never been able to speak about their own horrific experiences. Douglass begins building his ethos in the opening of chapter one when he claims of not knowing his birthday, unlike white citizens, who know every basic facts about themselves. Beginning with this fact makes Douglass credible because the reader now knows his experiences to be true. His complex word choices and advanced sentence structures could have lead one to believe that his writing was intended to be read from the upper-middle class. It was necessary for Douglass to establish himself on a level playing field as his audience in order for his intelligence to be taken seriously. He is able to be successful in establishing both ethos and pathos. By establishing himself equal to his audience, he is able to evoke emotion and influence their feelings of a need for change. The narrative enables Douglass to flaunt his hard-earned education. As stated before, his diction brings pathos to his work. He describes his experiences in a way that lets his audience feel the indignity of being owned by another person. For example, D... ... middle of paper ... ... himself, many slaves were mulattoes, making them no longer descendants of Ham. This realization shapes the idea that human freedom and equal rights may somebody be possible. One day, Douglass eavesdrops on him and Mrs. Auld’s conversation. Mr. Auld persuades her that reading “could do him (Douglass) no good, but a great deal of harm.” (page 39) This antithesis along with the rest of his statement makes Douglass come to the realization that literacy is equated with not only individual consciousness but also freedom. From that day on, Douglass makes it his goal to learn as much as he can, eventually learning how to write, a skill that would provide him with his passport to freedom. The narrative itself acts as a form of protest literature against slavery and also persuades the reader that Douglass has been transformed and is no longer a slave, but a free man.
As a former slave, bereft of any free will, written words were all but unavailable to Frederick Douglass. Slaves were unable to tell their stories, to expose the dehumanization that their enslavement caused on both sides of the racial rift; so it was necessary for Douglass to fight tooth and nail to obtain the right to learn, and ultimately to narrate his own life story. Amongst the narration, multiple rhetorical strategies are integrated into the text in order to uncover the dehumanizing effect their mistreatment had on slaves during this time. His primary purpose is to educate those who are ignorant of the horrible conditions that slaves lived in and the cruelty that they suffer. He does this through the use of rhetorical devices such as anecdotes, irony and by further connecting to his audience with pathos and ethos. By using his own personal experiences as the subject of his argument, Douglass is able to make a strong and compelling case against slavery; at a time when it was socially unacceptable to do so.
Douglass as both the author and narrator in his novel took readers through his escape from slavery. Specifically mentioned in chapter seven of the book, the author expressed his new skill of reading and how that inspired his freedom. Douglass utilized rhetorical devices in chapter seven, such as pathos and personification to illustrate to his audience how his education motivated him to achieve liberation. Douglass’ effective use of emotion throughout the chapter made his experiences appeal to readers. Also, the first and last sentences of chapter seven served as bookends to show how education influenced Douglass’ freedom because within those two phrases there was a portion of Douglass’ journey told on how he escaped salvation. Lastly, Douglass’
Literature is written in many ways and styles. During his time, Frederick Douglass’s works and speeches attracted many people’s attention. With the amount of works and speeches Douglass has given, it has influenced many others writers to express themselves more freely. Though Douglass lived a rigorous childhood, he still made it the best that he could, with the guidance and teaching of one of his slave owner’s wife he was able to read and write, thus allowing him to share his life stories and experiences. Douglass’s work today still remain of great impact and influence, allowing us to understand the reality of slavery, and thus inspiring many others to come out and share for others to understand.
In Frederick Douglass’s autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass is represented in two extremely dissimilar personas as both the narrator and the protagonist. The broad gap between Douglass’s two roles is an intriguing dichotomy throughout the Narrative: Douglass advances from an illiterate, subjugated slave to a sophisticated and eloquent public figure. Douglass recurrently embellishes this transformation from his younger immature self to his older wiser self throughout the book by noting his juvenile obliviousness, innocence, and ignorance. His progress is exemplified through self-criticism of how captivated he was as a teen taking
The book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave by Frederick Douglass can be interpreted in many ways. It is an autobiography that details Douglass’s experiences while he was enslaved. However, it is evident that he has been forced to censor the content of his narrative. Douglass mentions more than once that he is not able to say everything he desires. Moreover, on the surface the book is about the harshness of his life as a slave, but on a deeper level Douglass uses irony to give a compelling criticism of the institution of slavery. In his account he gives sarcastic descriptions of the privileges the slaves receive and what it looks like for slaves to be treated well. Nevertheless, both techniques of writing are effective
In Frederick Douglass' autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, he writes about the inhumanity and brutality of slavery, with the intention of informing white, American colonists. Douglass is thought to be one of the greatest leaders of the abolition, which radically and dramatically changed the American way of life, thus revolutionizing America. Douglass changed America, and accomplished this through writing simply and to the point about the "reality" of slavery, told through the point of view of a slave. In a preface of Douglass' autobiography, William Lloyd Garrison writes, "I am confident that it is essentially true in all its statements; that nothing has been set down in malice, nothing exaggerated, nothing drawn from the imagination; that it comes short of reality, rather than overstates a single fact in regard to slavery as it is" (Douglass, 6). This statement authenticates and guarantees Douglass' words being nothing but the truth.
From the beginning of the chapter one Douglass mentioned his separation from his origin, from his parents, therefore he did not ‘know’ himself. He was kept from the knowledge of his position in society. In first paragraph of chapter one, I noticed more than eight rhetorical expressions of negative views- “I have no,” “I could not,” “seldom,” “never” etc. These statements shows his big gap of his deprivation of knowledge. The young Douglass lived in the society neither a human nor an animal. Thus whites prevented him to build his own “self” and dehumanized him. W.E.B. DuBois introduces the idea of “Double-consciousnes”, he admits, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that’s looks on in amused contempt and pity.”(…) Douglass always fought with his inner feelings, and struggled to combine his inner self with his outer self. He always wanted to change his position. In the second half of the book he tried to grab the power of knowledge, and his position changed. He focused on literacy and language and became a teacher. He started to write and read and started to connect his intellectual mind with his speech and action. It was his first turning point, and this attempt awakening his mind. Slowly he was breaking the invisible wall around him, and tried to find the path to build his identity. Thus the second half of the book, in his journey his searching knowledge made him to say, “ I used to speak,”(77) “I told him,”(56) “I would tell them,” (57). “I said” etc. His masters started to hear Douglass’ voice who used to play a role of silent audience.
Frederick Douglass, an African American social reformer who escaped from slavery, in his autobiography “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself,” denotes the perilous life of a slave in the South. Through syntax, Douglass is able to persuade his readers to support the abolitionist movement as his writing transitions from shifting sentence lengths to parallel structure and finally to varying uses of punctuation. Douglass begins his memoir with a combination of long and short sentences that serve to effectively depict life his life as a slave. This depiction is significant because it illustrates the treatment of slaves in the south allows his audience to despise the horrors of slavery. In addition, this
The reader is first introduced to the idea of Douglass’s formation of identity outside the constraints of slavery before he or she even begins reading the narrative. By viewing the title page and reading the words “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, written by himself” the reader sees the advancement Douglass made from a dependent slave to an independent author (Stone 134). As a slave, he was forbidden a voice with which he might speak out against slavery. Furthermore, the traditional roles of slavery would have had him uneducated—unable to read and incapable of writing. However, by examining the full meaning of the title page, the reader is introduced to Douglass’s refusal to adhere to the slave role of uneducated and voiceless. Thus, even before reading the work, the reader knows that Douglass will show “how a slave was made a man” through “speaking out—the symbolic act of self-definition” (Stone 135).
Frederick Douglass is known for being an outstanding orator, but he is mostly acknowledged for being an incredible abolitionist. His work to demolish slavery has been greatly known, detailing his life experience as a slave and expressing his theory on slavery. In “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass,” he demonstrates the way religion and its literature, the bible, had a negative influence and effect on slavery as well as the development of white Christianity.
Throughout the novel, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Frederick Douglass provides a powerful insight to the world of slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries. After Douglass escaped the reigns of slavery, he became an anti-slavery advocate, educator, politician, and renowned public speaker, traveling abroad and sharing his story, eventually publishing an autobiography in 1845. Douglass makes a firm argument against slavery, emotionally affecting the reader while presenting himself as an ethical, compassionate, and resourceful individual.
Frederick Douglass was brought from Africa as a baby to the U.S. to become a slave during the 17th century. In his narrative book “Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass,” he used rhetoric to provoke reader’s emotions, and inspiration of hope when everything isn’t good. Douglass used the rhetoric appeal pathos to show people how horrible he was treated as a slave, and how he kept up his motivation about becoming free from slavery. In addition, he also used pathos so effective that readers can see his experiences in front of themselves.
In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, a slave narrative published in 1845, Frederick Douglass divulged his past as a slave and presented a multifaceted argument against slavery in the United States. Douglass built his argument with endless anecdotes and colorful figurative language. Additionally, he attempted to familiarize the naïve northerners with the hardships of slavery and negate any misconstrued ideas that would prolong slavery’s existence in American homes. Particularly in chapter seven, Douglass both narrated his personal experience of learning to write and identified the benefits and consequences of being an educated slave.
were feeling and its affect on them. Douglass appeals to the reader by pointing out that slaves
The confines of ignorance and both physical and mental abuse kept slaves from self discovery and rebellion. Frederick Douglass provides the journey of life as a brute to a free man. Frederick Douglass’s new identity included having a wife, a job of his own, a house, and the goal to reach out and help the people that were still stuck in slavery. From the rock bottom life of a slave he built himself up and became a successful