Desolation and Dominance: The Nature of Enslavement

Douglass utilizes imagery to identify the nature of desolation of the slave; the slave owner’s absolute dominance over the slaves manipulates the slaves understanding of sorrow, revealing the loss of self reflection as the nature of enslavement.

Douglass conveys the feeling of unknowingness and dehumanization by creating gloomy images within reader’s minds. He says that the “the tales of woe” are “beyond my feeble comprehension”, which implies that the sadness of the songs are communicating to him, but he does not understand the tunes meaning. The grief within the songs are too great for Douglass to absorb and understand. In addition, the use of “tones, loud, long, and deep” proves that he is lost for words. The words mentioned are very vague and simple, which demonstrates his inability to comprehend the tunes. Slaves can not understand each other’s songs, which also represents their lack of experience. When one can not experience, one can not know. Experience is what leads to knowledge, and that knowledge serves as a bank for one to utilize, but for the slaves, they have no experience of emotions, so they have no knowledge of feelings. When Douglass says: “ they breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish,” he suggests that the slaves are

In the world, readers see and understand everything the same as Douglass did when he was a slave himself. Slaves are not able to understand what they are feeling and this is one of the many limiting components of slavery. They are not able to carry out that emotion and to grieve or rejoice over it, but they can only know its existence. The presence of the feeling is known, but the understanding of that feeling is absence, Slaves are only suppressed under slavery because of their inability to fight back, their ineptitude to understand what slaver owners have inflicted upon them