The Use of Chiasmus to Highlight the Irony of Slavery in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglas

The Use of Chiasmus to Highlight the Irony of Slavery in Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

According to Barton and Hudson's Contemporary Guide to Literary Terms, a chiasmus is a rhetorical scheme that is "particularly effective in creating irony through the reversal of accepted truths or familiar ideas" (189). Frederick Douglass uses the chiasmus throughout his Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave to highlight the irony of slavery's existence in a country that was built upon the ideals of freedom. Throughout his autobiography, we find several specific instances of chiasmus that cause the reader to pause and focus on the point that Douglass is trying to make. Each chiasmus is placed in an important point of the text (and, therefore, an important point of Douglass' life) and calls attention to that passage's significance.

Let us begin with what is, perhaps, the most famous Douglass quotation: "You have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man" (64). This sentence serves as the turning point, the climax, of both Douglass' narrative and his life. Up until that point, throughout his entire life, the world had been busy making him a slave. From the moment he was born to a slave mother (even though his father was white), the forces of slavery had been suffocating his humanity. When he was forcibly separated from his mother, he lost the human closeness of family. When he helplessly witnessed his aunt being brutally beaten and was subjected to repeated beatings himself, he lost the human sense of pride. And, when he was denied education and literacy, he lost the human ability to obtain knowledge. In all of these ways, society turned Frederick Douglass, a man, int...

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...ee nation. Douglass marks his transformation from slave to man with a chiasmus just before his fight with Mr. Covey. He used two more to highlight events that led up to that climactic afternoon: one contrasting the will of the master and that of the slave, and other contrasting the freedom of the ships with Frederick's own bondage in slavery. Finally, Douglass uses a chiasmus to highlight the disparity between the free, near-utopian North, and the slaveholding, harsh South. His masterful use of the rhetorical tool of chiasmus allowed Frederick Douglass to expertly exhibit the irony of slavery to an entire nation.

Works Cited

Barton, Edwin J. and Glenda A. Hudson. A Contemporary Guide to Literary Terms. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2004.

Douglass, Frederick. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003.