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 uses irony to bring a point across to his audience, with the recounting of his own heritage. He explains that his separation after birth from his mother, a slave, and a majority of his foul treatment is likely because his white father feels a need to destroy the lives of his bastard children in order to reassert devotion to …show more content…
For instance, “...of all the mangled and emaciated creatures I looked upon, these two were the most so… the head, neck, and shoulders of Mary were literally cut to pieces… covered in festering sores.” (Douglass 65), weaving a harsh tone with his precise diction that cuts through any and all illusions one may have had regarding the morality of slavery. He is able to paint a clear picture of the stark reality, he makes his points exact, leaving no room for moral
Moreover, Frederick Douglass never ever in his entire life did he get to see his White father. Well he only knew that his father was but, nothing else. But he believed that’s his White father was his master. His master’s name was Aaron Anthony. So when Frederick Douglass was left abounded he had to leave with his grandmother to a plantation in Maryland. When Douglass the age of seven he started to witness slavery and racism. He witnessed firsthand brutal painful whippings to his fellow friends.
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.
For starters, Douglass uses pathos to get his point across. He uses stories in the bible to make his audience understand what he is trying to say. He especially used the story of Babylon to convey his point of how does Americans
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
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.
Frederick Douglass emphasizes the dehumanization aspect of slavery throughout his narrative. As is the general custom in slavery, Douglass is separated from his mother early in infancy and put under the care of his grandmother. He recalls having met his mother several times, but only during the night. She would make the trip from her farm twelve miles away just to spend a little time with her child. She dies when Douglass is about seven years old. He is withheld from seeing her in her illness, death, and burial. Having limited contact with her, the news of her death, at the time, is like a death of a stranger. Douglass also never really knew the identity of his father and conveys a feeling of emptiness and disgust when he writes, "the whisper that my master was my father, may or may not be true; and, true or false, it is of but little consequence to my purpose" (Douglass, 40). Douglass points out that many slave children have their masters as their father. In these times, frequently the master would take advantage of female slaves and the children born to the slave w...
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.
Through the use of ethos, pathos, and logos in his narrative, Frederick Douglass convinces his audience to take action against the heinous practice of slavery, and take strides towards equality. Douglass advocates for abolition by evoking an emotional response within his audience and debunking the flawed justifications for slavery. To this day, his narrative is not only considered one of the most powerful pieces of emancipation propaganda, but as a classic American
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).
Douglass appeals to pathos in his narrative through many quotes and traumatic events that he experienced. He states, “I was afraid to speak to anyone for fear of speaking to the wrong one, and thereby falling into the hands of money-loving kidnappers, whose business it was to lie in wait for their prey” (Douglass 113). By creating such an analogy, Douglass provokes guilty and sympathetic emotion from his readers. He’s saying that he doesn’t even know who he can and cannot trust, because slavery changes everyone’s personas and
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 sum, all of these key arguments exist in “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” because of the institution of slavery and its resulting lack of freedom that was used to defend it. This text’s arguments could all be gathered together under the common element of inequality and how it affected the practical, social, and even spiritual lives of the slaves.
“You are loosed from your moorings, and are free; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave!” (Douglass). In the Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass, the author is able to express his deepest emotions concerning slavery by both hiding his anger towards it and urging the audience to feel the same. The quote above is an example of Douglass’s animosity towards slavery. While Douglass does create a great feeling of disgust in the reader without bluntly stating his resentment, he reveals a more convincing argument when he is out right with his anger. Douglass communicates his emotions in this autobiography with his diction, tone, and imagery.
Fredrick Douglass focuses on both ethos and pathos when comes to persuasion. The most powerful example of ethos takes place in chapter one when he says he does not know his birthday, unlike white civilians. Opening with this information tells readers that he can be trusted because of his direct personal experience. Douglass provokes reader’s emotion with use of language in a way that helps audiences empathize with him. For example, he one of his masters have hired a man to have sex and reproduce with a slave woman for profit. He having to live with that and the vivid description shows a lot of