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Narrative of the life of frederick douglass analysis
Narrative of the life of frederick douglass analysis
Biography about fredrick douglass essay
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Why choose this story?
Why should the “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” by Frederick Douglass be included in the American Literature anthology? Everyone has his or her story to tell and a specific way to transcribe their thoughts into their story. What qualities does Douglass’s story possess that allows it to be showcased in the American Literature anthology? Frederick Douglass was an accomplished author who wrote about his fight for freedom. The short story outlines the first six months to a year of Douglass’s life as a slave. The “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” was chosen to be published in the American Literature anthology because of the captivating way in which Douglass describes his life as a slave and the sheer determination of how he gained his freedom.
Frederick Douglass was born a slave in
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Tuckahoe, Maryland. His mother was Harriet Bailey, who was also a slave, and his father was Harriet’s owner they thought. Although they did not know the exact date of his birthday, a slave journal proved it was February 1818. Harriet named him Frederick Augustus Washington Bailey, but he changed it to Frederick Douglass after escaping slavery in order to fool anyone who might come looking for him. He also had two sisters, Sarah and Eliza, and a brother, Perry, although Frederick stated, “slavery had made us strangers” (Alder). Frederick’s grandparents were Isaac and Betsey Bailey, with whom he spent his early years. Adler states, “Douglass’s years in his grandparents’ home were happy” (p.3). The “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” by Frederick Douglass, located in the American Literature anthology, is a short story about Frederick Douglass’s first six months as a slave. During this time, he worked for Mr. Covey, a strict slave owner who watched his slaves’ every move. Frederick fought back against Mr. Covey whipping him one time, and Mr. Covey never whipped him again. Frederick quickly learned how to be a hard worker once he started living with Mr. Covey. At the beginning of the story, Frederick was working with some of the other slaves fanning wheat. He was in charge of bringing the wheat to the fan. The job could not continue without him. The rising action started when Frederick became sick and too weak to work, or even walk, any longer. Mr. Covey heard the fan stop and came quickly to see what the problem was. He kicked Frederick multiple times to try to get him to stand up and get back to work, but every time he tried to stand up, he would immediately fall back down. Frederick could stand it no longer. The second Mr. Covey turned around, Frederick took off through the woods towards St. Michael’s to go to ask his master if he could find him a new home. When he arrived, Master Thomas told him that he needed to go back to Mr. Covey’s house. He allowed Frederick to stay the night, but he ordered him to go right back home the next morning. The climax started when Frederick got back home and Mr. Covey was about to tie him up and whip him, but Frederick fought back. They fought for two hours. The falling action started once Mr. Covey realized he could not win so he gave up. Mr. Covey told Frederick that he would not have whipped him half as much if he had not resisted, but the truth was that he actually had not whipped him at all. The fight with Mr. Covey was the turning point in Frederick’s career as a slave. It revived his sense of manhood and made him determined to become free. Although Frederick was still a slave for four years after that, he was never whipped again, but he did fight a few of his other owners to insure he would not be whipped. The main character of this story is Frederick Douglass. Frederick is a determined person who does not give up. He resisted against his owner when he was about to whip him badly. After the fight with his first owner, he became very determined to gain his freedom. He never let anyone beat him again. The other main character of this story is Mr. Covey. He is a mean slave-breaker that watches his slaves’ every move. He did not let Frederick rest even when he was sick and too weak to continue working. Mr. Covey beat Frederick at least once a week before he resisted against him. The setting of the story is around the 1830s in Maryland near St. Michael. It was a huge slave plantation, so the owners were used to having slaves and they treated them horribly. Maryland was one of the biggest places for slavery, so this made them more prone to treating them bad also. The setting of the story affected the characters because it made the slaves work harder while also being treated worse than others. This is proven with how Mr. Covey whipped Frederick at least once a week and how he watched his slaves like a hawk to make sure they did not take any breaks. Mr. Covey also tried to force Frederick to work when he was sick and too weak to work. The story is told from Frederick Douglass’s point of view. This impacts the story because the reader can tell what happened to him from his perspective and what his thoughts were throughout the storyline. If the story had been from someone else’s point of view, the reader would not have been able to tell what was happening while Frederick was at Master Thomas’s store in St. Michael or what happened to Frederick before Mr. Covey saw that he had returned. Frederick Douglass uses figurative language throughout his story.
He uses a simile when he says, “…raising ridges on my flesh as large as my little finger” (Douglass). This simile tells how the ridges on Frederick’s skin, made by Mr. Covey, raised up as high as his little finger. He also uses personification when he says, “My cart was upset and shattered…” (Douglass). This is personification because a cart cannot be upset. Upset is an emotion and nonliving things cannot have emotions. He uses other figurative language throughout his story, but these were just a few examples.
Frederick Douglass tells about his first six months as a slave in this story, so being a slave influenced him to write this story because he wants to tell others how wrong slavery is. If he had not been a slave, he would not have had this topic to write about and been able to make it so personal. There were many social constraints and a lot of political unrest in the United States at this time because of the slavery and the way colored people were treated. They had a lack of opportunity because most white people thought that colored people were not equal like
them. Frederick Douglass wrote his second autobiography, “My Bondage and My Freedom”. The first nine chapters include everything that he told in the first one he wrote. It continues on to tell about his next owner and learning to read. When he finally becomes free in 1838, he marries Anna Murray and moves to New Bedford, Massachusetts. He renames himself Frederick Douglass. He concludes the story by saying, “to promote the moral, social, religious, and intellectual elevation of the free colored people… to advocate the great and primary work of the universal and unconditional emancipation of my entire race” (Douglass). Douglass wrote his third autobiography, “Life and Times of Frederick Douglass”, which, includes three parts. The first two sections are the same as the other two autobiographies, but the third section is entirely new. The third section reveals an optimistic outlook based on the 1890 census which shows that there “are no longer four millions of slaves, but six millions of freemen” (Douglass). The new section “is to be finished by the hand by which it was begun” (Douglass). The “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass” was chosen to be put in the American Literature anthology because it was his first autobiography to be published. It was also the shortest of all of them because it was over the shortest amount of time. The people creating the anthology also could have picked that one because they needed a shorter story. The first year gave him the determination to become a free man. The “Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass” was published in the American Literature anthology because it was the beginning of Douglass’s story. This short story provided his initial experiences as a slave, which resulted in his will power to revolt against the constraints of the society. Douglass overcame all adversity that stood in his way to become a free man and this narrative shows the hardships he faced. Fredrick Douglass was a remarkable man who will forever leave his imprint in the literature world because he was strong enough to fight for the good of society as a whole. Works Cited Adler, David A. Frederick Douglass A Noble Life. Holiday House, 2010, New York. Allen, Janet et al. American Literature. Houghten Mifflin Harcourt, 2012, pp.560-569. Douglass, Frederick. Summary of Life and Times of Frederick Douglass. Docsouth.unc.edu/neh/dougl92/summary.html Douglass, Frederick. Summary of My Bondage and My Freedom. www.docsouth.unc.edu/neh/douglass55/summary.html
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, 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
From before the country’s conception to the war that divided it and the fallout that abolished it, slavery has been heavily engrained in the American society. From poor white yeoman farmers, to Northern abolitionist, to Southern gentry, and apathetic northerners slavery transformed the way people viewed both their life and liberty. To truly understand the impact that slavery has had on American society one has to look no further than those who have experienced them firsthand. Frederick Douglass, an escaped slave and advocate for the abolitionist, is on such person. Douglass was a living contradiction to American society during his time. He was an African-American man, self-taught, knowledgeable, well-spoken, and a robust writer. Douglass displayed a level of skill that few of his people at the time could acquire. With his autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave Written by Himself, Douglass captivated the people of his time with his firsthand accounts into the horror and brutality that is the institution of slavery.
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.
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.
Fredrick Douglass assumes the part of storyteller and he demonstrates to us that the purpose of this account is to demonstrate the movement he has produced using uneducated, mistreated slave to a common and understandable political observer. One may even trust this is the topic of the whole work. As Frederick Douglass states, "I have been much of the time asked how I felt when I ended up in a free state. I have never possessed the capacity to answer the inquiry with any fulfillment to myself". In spite of the fact that he has come to "opportunity" in the north he can't relax on the grounds that he expects that at any moment he may be grabbed and sent back toward the south. He reasons for alarm being oppressed again and has considerations
The issue of slavery in antebellum America was not black and white. Generally people in the North opposed slavery, while inhabitants of the South promoted it. However, many people were indifferent. Citizens in the North may have seen slavery as neither good nor bad, but just a fact of Southern life. Frederick Douglass, knowing the North was home to many abolitionists, wrote his narrative in order to persuade these indifferent Northern residents to see slavery as a degrading practice. Douglass focuses on dehumanization and freedom in order to get his point across.
Slave owners in the South were some of the most cruel and inhumane human beings out there. They used many tactics to maintain a prosperous system of slavery amongst them. Like many, Frederick Douglass was born a slave. Deprived of as much as possible, Douglass knew not much more than his place of birth. Masters were encouraged to dispossess slaves of any knowledge and several of them did not know their birthdays or other personal details of themselves. The purpose of this was to keep slaves as misinformed of anything other than labor as possible. Slave owners knew the dangers that would upraise if slaves became literate and brave enough to fight for freedom.
The Narrative of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass is written to have people place their feet in the shoes of Frederick Douglass and try to understand the experience he went through as a slave. Douglass writes this piece of literature with strong wording to get his point across. He is not trying to point out the unpleasant parts of history, but to make people face the truth. He wants readers to realize that slavery is brutalizing and dehumanizing, that a slave is able to become a man, and that some slaves, like himself, have intellectual ability. These points are commonly presented through the words of Douglass because of his diction.
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
The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass gives a first person perspective on the life of a slave laborer in both the rural south and the city. Frederick Douglass gave himself an education against horrible odds, and was able to read and think forever about the evils of slavery and good reasons for its abolishment. The primary reason for his disgust with slavery was its effect of dehumanizing not only the slaves, but their masters too. His main goal: to abolish slavery.
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.
After reading Frederick Douglass’s narrative of slavery, I couldn’t help but stop and try to gather my thoughts in any way possible. It was not the first time I had read the narrative, but this time around Douglass’s words hit me much harder. Perhaps, it was that I read the narrative in a more critical lens, or possibly it was just that I am older and more mature now from the last time I read it, but whatever the reason, I can confidently say reading the narrative has changed my heart and opened my eyes in many ways. I have always been aware of the injustices that slavery encompassed and of course like many other people, I have been taught about slavery in a historical narrative my entire life. But, Frederick Douglass’s narrative does more than just provide a historical perspective in seeing the injustices in slavery. His narrative asks the reader to look directly into the eyes of actual slaves and realize their very heart beat and existence as humans. Douglass humanizes the people of whom the terrible acts we acted upon that we learn about as early as elementary school. It is because of this that I decided to write this poem. Reading the narrative made me really think about Douglass’s journey and the story he tells on his road to freedom. I felt as if he was really speaking to me and, and in turn I wanted to give Douglass a voice in my own writing.
When first introduced to Douglass and his story, we find him to be a young slave boy filled with information about those around him. Not only does he speak from the view point of an observer, but he speaks of many typical stereotypes in the slave life. At this point in his life, Frederick is inexperienced and knows nothing of the pleasures of things such as reading, writing, or even the rights everyone should be entitled to. Douglass knowing hardly anything of his family, their whereabouts, or his background, seems to be equivalent to the many other slaves at the time. As a child Frederick Douglass sees the injustices around him and observes them, yet as the story continues we begin to see a change.
...a lot of atrocities at the hands of their owners, who were successful in using ignorance as a tool of slavery, besides treating them as personal property. However, the slaves struggled to gain education on their own, ultimately knowing their rights and questioning some of the heinous acts. Slave owners ensured that slaves worked tirelessly so that they do not get time to idle around and gather in groups that would shake the administration. The narrative, through highlighting the experiences of Douglass himself, painted a true picture of the type of life slaves were undergoing under the surveillance of their slave masters in the United States, a picture that the slaveholders did not want to be brought to the limelight.