The idea that “There is always a better day coming”(39) feeds hope into depressed minds, fueling their fight to the next day. In Frederick Douglass’ narrative he fights on too that idea, and eventually frees himself from the bonds of slavery. Douglass’ command of language creates a shift in tone from hopeful to damaged, conveying that freedom will come to those who withstand the hardships and oppression placed on them. Through symbolism, repetition, and bright imagery the author creates the tone of hopefulness. In contrast Douglass uses harsh details and diction to shift the tone to tired and wounded.
The symbolism of boats, parallelism in sentence structure, and bright imagery all work together to create a hopeful tone. The boats on
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the Chesapeake Bay during this passage symbolize the embodiment of freedom.
These “...sails moving off to the mighty ocean”(38) can go wherever they please instilling a passion of hope in Douglass’ life that one day he too will be as free as the ships. The imagery the author uses during this part of the passage amplifies the symbolism. The “beautiful vessels”, “gallant decks”, and the “lofty banks of that noble bay” paint the picture of the brilliant symbolism in every readers mind. This imagery becomes almost plaintive for readers, evoking a feeling in them that everyone should experience the happiness of being free. By painting this bright picture of the bay to symbolize that freedom is almost in the grasps of Douglass creates the hopeful tone in his voice throughout his first passage. The tone at this point is able to instill hope in other oppressed people that freedom will come one day. Parallelism also works with the symbolism here to reinforce the the the feeling of freedom the ships come to symbolize. The repetition of “O” at the beginning of his sentences emphasizes his longing to be on the ships of freedom. By emphasizing his longing for freedom he …show more content…
also instills hope in readers that one day all slaves and other oppressed people will stop longing for freedom and simply be free. Through the emphasis of the mourning for freedom more readers are able to recognize the symbolism of the ships. Recognizing this symbolism allows the audience to appreciate the freedoms they were handed, and contemplate on why some people are stripped of that right to freedom. Overall all three devices work together by building on each other to convey a tone of hopefulness that minorities will no longer be oppressed. However through the passage the tone shifts to wounded and tired. This shift in tone is shown through the change in diction and detail during this passage.
The selection of detail and diction after the shift become more harsh and resentful. Through the use of words like “staggered”, “relief”, and “immense”(39, 40) he shifts his tone from hopeful to one of tiredness. Douglass’ use of worn diction here shows how even though people may have hope they will still have to deal with the great amount of oppression they are put through until freedom. The selection of detail changes to contain more graphic images of harm. The inclusion of the “...blow upon the head...” creating a wound in which “...blood ran freely...”(40) builds upon the tired diction to create an image of the horrors the slaves are put through. This images evokes an emotional appeal which saddens the audience provoking them to put an end to these atrocities. The tired diction and harsh selection of details connect in another way through the idea that the more tired a slave is the less work they will be able to do, with less work leading to more suffering caused by their master. This idea allows this connection between the diction and selection of details to be meaningful and to emphasize the flaws of slavery. Both the change in diction and change in detail create a change in tone which shifts to one of fatigued suffering. This new tone illustrates the hardships oppressed people go through on their journey to freedom. This contrast in tone created in this passage allows the ideas
conveyed by the contrasting tones to combine to convey Douglass’ message to other oppressed people and the bystanders watching. The message conveyed through this contrast is that if people have the hope that they will not simply languish in their current state and that they do not acquiesce to their master’s harm they will one day be free. The symbolism created through the use of bright imagery and emphasized with parallelism creates a tone which contrasts the tone created by selection of tired diction and horrifying details used in the later half of the passage. This tone shift from one of hope to one of damaged fatigue created through Douglass’ expert use of rhetorical devices conveys his message that with hope people are able to overcome and outlast the tortures of the world and will one day free themselves from them. This message entices bystanders to join the fight to end oppression, gives hope to the oppressed that freedom is coming soon, and may even instil fear in oppressors through how strong people with hope will be. The power to fight one more day is drawn from the belief that “There is always a better day coming”(39).
In paragraph two, Douglass states “for who is there so cold……? Who so obdurate……? Who so stolid……?” This passage serves to personify the slave’s eternal struggle for survival and creates the impression that the enslaved are humans too. In the fourteenth paragraph, Douglass describes, “to beat them with sticks, to flay their flesh, to load their limbs with irons, to hunt them with dogs…” This vivid imagery serves to contextualize slavery with humanity. America is thus both the best and worst representations of humankind. Douglass therefore creates a self portrait of slavery as America’s evil shadow, sketching it as a terrible
The author's diction manages to elicit emotional connotations of genuine happiness and well-placed helplessness as he depicts the chronological events of his chance to live a better life in the north. As the road Douglass takes unwinds before him the "loneliness" follows him in pursuit like a "den of hungry lions"
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.
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.
The narrative enables Douglass to flaunt his hard-earned education. As stated before, his diction brings pathos to his work. He describes his experiences in a way that lets his audience feel the indignity of being owned by another person. For example, D...
In this narrative, Douglass describes his life as a slave in ways that is brutalizing and dehumanizing. He wants his readers to understand that concept. By doing this, Douglass writes, “I was seized with a violent aching of the head, attended with extreme dizziness; I trembled in every limb” (416). Douglass uses diction such as seized, aching, extreme dizziness, and trembled to help create a picture of the pain he had felt during his experiences of being a slave for Mr. Covey. Another example is when he writes, “I told him as well as I could, for I scarce had strength to speak. He then gave me a savage kick in the side, and told me to get up I tried to do so, but fell back in the attempt. He gave me another kick, and again told me to rise. I again tried, and succeeded in gaining my feet; but stooping to get the tub with which I was feeding the fan, I again staggered and fell” (416-17). Words like scarce, savage, and staggered place imagery into the reader’s minds of what he went through as a slave. One other way that Douglass shows how his words emphasize the message is when he writes, “The blood was yet oozing from the wound on my head. For a time I thought I should bleed to death; and think now that I should have done so, but that the blood so matted my hair as to stop the w...
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
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.
The tone established in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is unusual in that from the beginning to the end the focus has been shifted. In the beginning of the narrative Douglass seems to fulfill every stereotypical slavery theme. He is a young black slave who at first cannot read and is very naïve in understanding his situation. As a child put into slavery Douglass does not have the knowledge to know about his surroundings and the world outside of slavery. In Douglass’ narrative the tone is first set as that of an observer, however finishing with his own personal accounts.
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, brings to light many of the social injustices that colored men, women, and children all were forced to endure throughout the nineteenth century under Southern slavery laws. Douglass's life-story is presented in a way that creates a compelling argument against the justification of slavery. His argument is reinforced though a variety of anecdotes, many of which detailed strikingly bloody, horrific scenes and inhumane cruelty on the part of the slaveholders. Yet, while Douglas’s narrative describes in vivid detail his experiences of life as a slave, what Douglass intends for his readers to grasp after reading his narrative is something much more profound. Aside from all the physical burdens of slavery that he faced on a daily basis, it was the psychological effects that caused him the greatest amount of detriment during his twenty-year enslavement. In the same regard, Douglass is able to profess that it was not only the slaves who incurred the damaging effects of slavery, but also the slaveholders. Slavery, in essence, is a destructive force that collectively corrupts the minds of slaveholders and weakens slaves’ intellects.
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).
At first glance, the book “my bondage and my freedom by Frederick Douglass appeared to be extremely dull and frustrating to read. After rereading the book for a second time and paying closer attention to the little details I have realized this is one of the most impressive autobiographies I have read recently. This book possesses one of the most touching stories that I have ever read, and what astonishes me the most about the whole subject is that it's a true story of Douglass' life. “ Douglass does a masterful job of using his own experience to expose the injustice of slavery to the world. As the protagonist he is able to keep the reader interested in himself, and tell the true story of his life. As a narrator he is able to link those experiences to the wider experiences of the nation and all society, exposing the corrupting nature of slavery to the entire nation.”[1] Although this book contributes a great amount of information on the subject of slavery and it is an extremely valuable book, its strengths are overpowered by its flaws. The book is loaded with unnecessary details, flowery metaphors and intense introductory information but this is what makes “My Bondage and My Freedom” unique.
The theme of a journey is a common metaphor used in poetry. This is no exception in two poems by famous poets of the 19th century: Walt Whitman and Alfred, Lord Tennyson. In Whitman’s poem “O Captain! My Captain!” from his collection Leaves of Grass, he writes of the sorrow over a fallen ship captain coming into the home harbor. Lord Tennyson’s “Crossing the Bar” expresses the hopes on the departure of a journey. Both poems use the metaphor of a boat’s trip over the sea as a spiritual journey to death. The poems have many similarities, but also differences that give character to each poem. Each poem is shaped by its imagery, speaker, and emotional invocation. Without such literary devices, the poems would not have such an emotional impact of the reader.