Frederick Douglass Narrative Analysis

The Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass, An American slave takes a look at how it really feels like to be a slave. There is only so much you can learn about slavery in the textbooks. Oftentimes we know what slavery is, but never really understand how brutal it was for the slaves. Within the autobiography, chapter one lets you learn about who Frederick Douglass is and you learn about his childhood. You learn about his family, and the life he lived as a slave. Douglass shares his experiences to help us learn how exactly slaves were treated. Douglass emphasizes his writing in a unique style to capture the audience, while also reeling in their emotions to embrace the experience of being a slave, and uses an effective tone to illustrate

The use of all these personal examples helps establish that he is a credible writer based on the stories he has lived through. Douglass presents his personal experience as the typical slave experience you expect, then makes an analytical point of its significance, and then further illustrates why slavery is wrong and the impact it has. The author builds on the audience 's emotions, by giving the hard facts of what slavery is really like. Douglass really impacts the reader by telling the stories of his past, they make you realize you didn’t know how bad the slaves have had it. The experience that really made me feel sad was the beatings. These poor slaves got beaten for no reason most of the time. Douglass, near the middle of the chapter starts to talk about family, and how he didn 't have much of a family. However he did have an aunt, and he had to witness and hear the gruesome sounds of his own aunt getting beaten. The author incorporates the idea of the aunt on the third page second paragraph. “I have been often awakened at the dawn of the day by the most heart-rending shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up and joist, and whip upon his naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no prayers, from this gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose” (Douglass 51). The

He starts to go in some detail of his Aunt Hester. He doesn 't go into full detail where he speaks of every aspect of what has happened to her. His sentences are always short, but to the point. What Douglass often does in his writing is makes understatements. In chapter one he never fully goes into detail, and so you don 't see how bad it really could be. He provides us with short sentences, but sometimes those short sentences don 't give us the full meaning behind what he was trying to say. He makes it sound like the idea is less important than it really is, and makes it sound like some of the stuff is no big deal whereas to the reader it comes off as a huge shock. Douglass writes as if he was telling a friend about his day. In the last paragraph of chapter one Douglass dedicates it to talking about the brutal hardships that Aunt Hester went through. “Aunt Hester had not only disobeyed his orders in going out, but had been found in company with Lloyd 's Ned; which circumstance, I found, from what he said while whipping her, was the chief offence,” (Douglass, 52). The author could have gone into more detail rather than rushing it all one sentence. He could have described more of the feeling of the aunt or even how he felt about the matter, but that isn 't how Douglass structures his writing. He doesn 't feel