Olaudah Equiano Rhetorical Analysis Essay

Rhetoric stands as an author’s most powerful weapon. It has the ability to persuade politicians, challenge ideas, and even influence the everyday worker. Olaudah Equiano wrote his narrative with one purpose in mind: to encourage masters to treat their slaves with respect. Equiano tells his Interesting Narrative from his time in Africa to his visitation in between as a way to bring about change in the slave industry. Equiano most effectively does this through his use of rhetorical strategies, such as imagery and Biblical allusions and references which prove he knows his audience to successfully influence his readers to reform- and maybe even abolish- the slave industry, Through the eye’s of the white plantation owner in the eighteenth century, Equiano is less than credible. Equiano himself mentions that free blacks have less rights than slaves(Equiano 88). Equiano is aware of this. Showing he knows his audience well, Equiano begins to use Biblical allusions and references to build his credibility.

He begins doing this in chapter two, when he describes the conditions of the first slave ship he ever boarded, “[t]he closeness of the place, the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, being so crowded that each scarcely had room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspiration, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells which brought on a sickness of which many died”(Equiano 35). This graphic description appeals to his audience’s sense of humanity. Having heard of the sufferings of others, most moral, ethical, and empathetic humans would feel remorse and sorrow for these slaves. Ever-aware of his audience, Equiano knows that horrific, vivid details of human suffering and torture will appeal to powerful whites and may even influence them to bring about