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Frederick douglass literary devies
The role of race in US slavery
Frederick Douglass about reading and writing
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Douglass uses formal English instead of informal to better appeal to his audience, who is used to the formal way of writing. He does not write in the vernacular, which is very deviant from the way a freed slave at the time would write. Douglass does this to appeal to his white educated audience so that he would, in the narrative, appear an equal to any of the readers. He also uses politically correct terms, such as “colored man†instead of the offensive “nigger†so that his audience will not feel uncomfortable with the text.
Douglass called himself an American slave remind that slavery was not in some foreign land it happened in America the land of the free. The book is more of a casual register because Douglass wants the reader to understand him. But there are higher reading levels and parts of the book can be difficult in reading.
Frederick Douglass wrote in his 1845 autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, about the devastation associated with slavery and the destruction from which comes desperation. Douglass intends to summon upon the guilt and empathy of his white audience by giving an account from which the reader is able to coax up a new perspective on the dreadful oppression. Seen especially in the third paragraph where Douglass provides a series of rhetorical devices including: apostrophe, anaphora, personification, exemplum, and epithet in his sorrowful bellowing to passing ships.
The first and second paragraphs evidently consist of sentences of some sort of length, the third paragraphs are shorter, but, portray more meaning. Although the whole passage depicts powerful speech, the difference of syntax is defined by his day-to-day life, which is seen in the first and second paragraph, and his dreams, which is seen in the third paragraph. Furthermore, Douglass use of exclamation points, as it exemplifies his desperation and his yearning for freedom, in contrast to the first two paragraphs. Additionally, the parallelism in the third paragraph is completely different from the first two, Douglass uniforms his all his sentences in the third paragraph in a very similar way such as “O that I were free!, O, that I were on one of your gallant decks" (38). In using shorter very unsimilar syntax between the first two paragraphs and the third, Douglass renders that the slave is not an animal or beast, but a human being, that longs for nothing but to become
Lee, Lisa Yun. “The Politics of Language in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of an American Slave.” Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism, 2004. Literature Resource Center. 24 April, 2014. .
Douglass' narrative was groundbreaking because he had never been able to speak about his own horrific experiences. Douglass begins building his ethos in the opening of chapter one when he claims to not know his birthday, unlike white citizens, who know every basic fact 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.
Frederick Douglass was a magnificent and clever learner. Learning is as much a skill as the things it is used to acquire, and Douglass was very skillful. As a boy Douglass was abused and punished for his scholarly interests, but he never lost his passion and drive to gain more knowledge. He engaged in clever tricks, games, and habits to increase his literacy. Douglass says at the beginning of his life his knowledge was a curse, and it seemed so, but I think that into his teens he realized what a powerful ally it could be. Then in his later life it became his strongest ally. Douglass’s opinion of knowledge changed from negative to positive due to his change in position.
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 the reality, rather than overstates a single fact in regard to SLAVERY AS IT IS."(Garrison, 34). The significance of this statement validates and promises that Douglass' words are nothing but the truth. This made the narrative more marketable to the white audience and people were listening. Douglass realized that he did not need assurance from white people to be respected. That's why he addressed his master for all the wrong things done to him. Slaves are looked as not human. Douglass completes his journey from slave to man when he creates his own identity. He speaks out, fighting as an abolitionist and finally becoming an author. Douglass tells his story not simply as a search for fr...
Slavery consisted of numerous inhumane horrors completed to make its victims feel desolated and helpless. Many inescapable of these horrors of slavery are conveyed in the “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”. The entire prospect of the duration of the story is to plan an escape from the excruciating conditions awaiting Douglass as a slave. When his escape is finally executed, unpredictable emotions and thoughts overwhelm him. Within the conclusion of his narrative (shown in the given passage), Frederick Douglass uses figurative language, diction, and syntax to portray such states of mind he felt after escaping slavery: relief, loneliness, and paranoia.
On July 5th of 1852, the Ladies Antislavery Society of Rochester requested that emancipated slave, Fredrick Douglass, speak for their celebration of the United States’ national independence. Douglass accepted this request and presented a powerful speech that explained and argued his true beliefs and feelings concerning this event. He considered their decision to request him as a speaker on that day to be a mockery of his past and of the ongoing status of blacks as slaves in America at the time. Nevertheless, Douglass skillfully constructed his speech utilizing various methods that forced his audience to take him seriously and think twice about the issue of slavery in America. His passion about the subject, his ability to captivate his audience, and his persuasive skills combine to form a clearly effective speech that continues to be studied to this day. Douglass warmed up his audience by commending the moral and patriotic excellence of their forefathers. He then delivered the argument of his speech which cleverly criticized the hypocrisy of the institution of slavery and those who tolerated or supported it. Yet, to conclude his speech, Douglass asserts that there is still hope for the young nation so as not to leave the audience completely discouraged. The way in which Douglass constructed and delivered this speech had a lasting impact and left his audience with an effectively argued point to consider.
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. 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.
The hopeful and then helpless tones in Douglass' passage reflect his inner turmoil throughout the process of his escape from the wretched south. At first, Frederick Douglass feels the utter feeling of happiness covering every inch of his body and soul. However, he soon finds out that the rosy path has thorns that dug into his skin as freedom was dangled in front of his face through a tunnel of complete darkness.
Frederick Douglass uses the rhetorical appeal, ethos, in two specific ways: to provide the credence of his statements and to identify himself to the reader. Douglass uses his writing skills to provide a familiar perception to which his readers are accustomed. He does not provide exact dates to accompany his story, because slaves back then were kept ignorant, as Douglass states, “I have no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing it” (Douglass 19). Our culture thrives on important dates such as, someone’s birthday, a holiday, or an anniversary, etc., and Douglass was blind to all of these events. He identifies himself as a normal human being, when in fact, he has had what seems like to us, a completely
America in the mid to early nineteenth century saw the torture of many African Americans in slavery. Plantation owners did not care whether they were young or old, girl or boy, to them all slaves were there to work. One slave in particular, Frederick Douglass, documented his journey through slavery in his autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Through the use of various rhetorical devices and strategies, Douglass conveys the dehumanizing and corrupting effect of slavery, in order to show the overall need for American abolition. His use of devices such as parallelism, asyndeton, simile, antithesis, juxtaposition and use of irony, not only establish ethos but also show the negative effects of slavery on slaves, masters and
In this narrative, Douglass describes his life as a slave in ways that is brutalizing and dehumanizing. He wants his readers to understand that concept. By doing this, Douglass writes, “I was seized with a violent aching of the head, attended with extreme dizziness; I trembled in every limb” (416). Douglass uses diction such as seized, aching, extreme dizziness, and trembled to help create a picture of the pain he had felt during his experiences of being a slave for Mr. Covey. Another example is when he writes, “I told him as well as I could, for I scarce had strength to speak. He then gave me a savage kick in the side, and told me to get up I tried to do so, but fell back in the attempt. He gave me another kick, and again told me to rise. I again tried, and succeeded in gaining my feet; but stooping to get the tub with which I was feeding the fan, I again staggered and fell” (416-17). Words like scarce, savage, and staggered place imagery into the reader’s minds of what he went through as a slave. One other way that Douglass shows how his words emphasize the message is when he writes, “The blood was yet oozing from the wound on my head. For a time I thought I should bleed to death; and think now that I should have done so, but that the blood so matted my hair as to stop the w...
While writing about the dehumanizing nature of slavery, Douglass eloquently and efficiently re-humanize African Americans. This is most evident throughout the work as a whole, yet specific parts can be used as examples of his artistic control of the English language. From the beginning of the novel, Douglass’ vocabulary is noteworthy with his use of words such as “intimation […] odiousness […] ordained.” This more advanced vocabulary is scattered throughout the narrative, and is a testament to Douglass’ education level. In conjunction with his vocabulary, Douglass often employed a complex syntax which shows his ability to manipulate the English language. This can be seen in Douglass’ self-description of preferring to be “true to [himself], even at the hazard of incurring ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and incur [his] own abhorrence.” This is significant because it proves that Douglass can not only simply read and write, but he has actually obtained a mastery of reading and writing. This is a highly humanizing trait because it equates him in education level to that of the stereotypical white man, and how could one deny that the white man is human because of his greater education? It is primarily the difference in education that separates the free from the slaves, and Douglass is able to bridge this gap as a pioneer of the