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Short essay on willpower
Short essay on willpower
Short essay on willpower
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In his self-titled chronicle, "Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave", the author presents his audience with a memorable description of his resourcefulness in how he learned to write. His determination to shake off the bonds of illiteracy imposed by his slaveholders created in him the ability to conquer obstacles that held many slaves back. His mastery of the basic steps of the written language would one day play a central role in his success as a free man. The way these skills were acquired teaches us not only of his willpower, but also of his ingenuity as well. The outcome of his efforts culminated in an inimitable slave-narrative, as well as a career as one of the most famous abolitionists that this country would ever know. From an early age, Frederick Douglass refused to accept the life of confinement into which he was born. The way he learned to write is a fine example of his exceptional resourcefulness and persistence to rise above. In The Norton Anthology of World Literature, Douglass's depiction of his self-education can be found on page 94...
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 Douglas was born into the slave trade in Talbot County, Maryland. He was sent to work on a plantation for the Hugh’s Family for about seven years. This is the location where his learning truly began. His mistress was a “kind, tender-hearted, woman” who treated Frederick as a human instead of property the family owned. This was a dangerous thing for both parties at this time in history it was considered wrong. Frederick States “Slavery proved as injurious to her as it did to me” which I see the connection he had made to her change of personality because of slavery. She had heavenly qualities that slavery was able to divest from her. It was injurious to Fredrick not only for the lashings a salve would receive but to have his former teacher stopped teaching him. Beginning to follow her husband’s teaching who forbid her to teach the slaves she became violent. Douglas says “nothing made her more angry than to see me with a newspapers” and that resulted in her rushing Frederick with a face of fury taking the paper away. His former mistress who gave him his first lesson expressed her new found apprehension to education and slavery co-existing. His mistress gave him an inch by teaching Douglas the alphabet now he was about to take the mile. He began to make friends with the white boys he would meet in the streets while running errands in town. Frederick always took a book and bread when he left for town. The boys who were willing to teach him would be paid in bread which he was allowed to have plenty of. The white boys who were teaching him where considerable poor in comparison to the family that referred to Frederick “chattel”. Young Frederick spoke powerful words to two his teachers who lived on Phil...
In Frederick Douglass’s autobiography Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass is represented in two extremely dissimilar personas as both the narrator and the protagonist. The broad gap between Douglass’s two roles is an intriguing dichotomy throughout the Narrative: Douglass advances from an illiterate, subjugated slave to a sophisticated and eloquent public figure. Douglass recurrently embellishes this transformation from his younger immature self to his older wiser self throughout the book by noting his juvenile obliviousness, innocence, and ignorance. His progress is exemplified through self-criticism of how captivated he was as a teen taking
Literacy plays an important part in helping Douglass achieve his freedom. Learning to read and write enlightened his mind to the injustice of slavery; it kindled in his heart longings for liberty. Douglass’s skills proved instrumental in his attempts to escape and afterwards in his mission as a spokesman against slavery. Douglass was motivated to learn how to read by hearing his master condemn the education of slaves. Mr. Auld declared that education would “spoil” him and “forever unfit him to be a slave” (2054).
Douglass wrote three biographies about his life as a politician, slave, and abolitionist. However, the historical value of these works does not remain as important as the quality of the works themselves. Frederick Douglass’ writing deserves recognition in the canon of great American authors, because his work meets the chosen criteria for inclusion in a collection of important literature. Douglass influenced many famous abolitionists with his literary works, and this impact, coupled with his desire to write an expose about oppression in America, makes him a winning candidate. Although his published works, mostly autobiographies, received much acclaim from abolitionists, this paper explores the quality of Douglass’s work from a literary standpoint. This paper also details the events shaping Douglass’s impressive life and writing career. By examining the prestigious “life and times” of this black author, the reader will recognize the widespread influence of Douglass’s writing on other antislavery writers, politics, and hence, the public. In a look at his first and greatest work, Narrative of the Life, the following paper will demonstrate why Frederick Douglass deserves a place in the hall of great American writers. To fully appreciate the impact of Douglass’s autobiographies, we must examine violent period in which he lived. Douglass, born in 1818, grew up as a slave on Colonel Lloyd’s plantation in eastern Maryland. At the time, abolitionist movements started gaining speed as popular parties in the North. In the North, pro-slavery white mobs attacked black communities in retaliation for their efforts. By the time Douglass escaped from slavery, in 1838, tensions ran high among abolitionists and slaveowners. Slaves published accounts of their harrowing escapes, and their lives in slavery, mainly with the help of ghostwriters. Although abolitionists called for the total elimination of slavery in the South, racial segregation still occurred all over the United States. Blacks, freemen especially, found the task of finding a decent job overwhelming.
In conclusion, two important literary nonfiction forms that Frederick Douglass identifies in “How I Learned to Read and Write” are a sense of place, and personal experience. Douglass’s essay executed examples of these two forms separately as well as together, numerous times throughout his piece. Douglass centralized his writing around his personal experiences, studying and accomplishing the ability to read and write despite the many difficulties he faced. The portrayal of a sense of place ingrained throughout his writing sheds a light on the locations and stages in his life he experienced these events. He was able to successful correlate these two forms together to create an unforgettable and inspirational story. A story of overcoming adversity, and achieving the impossible in a time whenever all odds were against him.
Fredrick Douglas is a well known figure in the abolishment movement through his narrative “Learning to Read and Write,” Douglas shares his own personal journey of how he learns to read and write. His organization helps the reader get a better grasp of the stages in his life; his innocence, his epiphany, his loathing and finally his determination. Through the use of syntax and diction, metaphors and the use of irony, he portrays the thoughts that went through his mind as a slave.
Douglass endured a brutal life as he was born into slavery, a major disadvantage, which challenged him to transform not only his own life but the lives of others so that they would not have to experience the torturous life as a slave. Douglass was betrayed by his family as they dropped him off at a plantation because they could not take care of him (PBS N.P.). His brutal life as a slave was compounded by the fact that his parents only gave him one thing in life, a white master. This tragic event allowed Douglass to put immense passion and emotion into his writing. He was not only writing to degrade the slave ridden society but to make a name for himself because he had no family to rely upon. His contributions to literature were immeasurable as he wrote from a perspective that had never been investigated. He added to the Southern culture accurate events that happened and the true life of a slave that historians later picked up. He taught himself how to read and write so his form was completely unique and personal (D...
In the year 1826 Fredrick Douglass realized that he would eventually escape slavery. He would recount this thought four times in his life when he has to become most rebellious in order to survive slaveholders attempting to establish control and dominance in different ways. Each time one comes along Douglass responds using a different form of retaliation or rebellion to show his masters that they don’t own as much control over him as they think they do. All of these attempts to resist his masters control, slavery, and what slavery stood for were detrimental to Fredrick’s escape but the most influential one, the resistive act that started, and kept, the ball rolling was Fredrick’s determination to become literate. Knowledge is power and without his ability to read and write Douglass would have never escaped slavery or written a Narrative of his life.
During the days of slavery many slaves did not know the alphabet, let alone reading and writing. Douglass feels distant from his close ones and is often stressed about his situation. Sometimes, he would be so tensed that he feels that there is no other option than to take his own life in order to be free and escape the misery of slavery. Frederick Douglass was stressed and he would find himself “regretting [his] own existence, and now wishing [himself] dead;” he had no doubt that “[he] should have killed [himself]” (146). Douglass is clearly suffering from the knowledge he gains because it leads him to be estranged and makes him often want to end his own life. This is not a good practice for anyone in life for the reason that life is precious and it should never be taken for granted. Before Douglass learns how to read, he was content with his condition as a slave, but this proved a cruel incident that occurred in his life by making him
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. Additionally, 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 the essay “Learning to Read and Write,” Frederick Douglass illustrates how he successfully overcome the tremendous difficulties to become literate. He also explains the injustice between slavers and slaveholders. Douglass believes that education is the key to freedom for slavers. Similarly, many of us regard education as the path to achieve a career from a job.
In Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, written by Frederick Douglass himself, is a story of Douglass’ courageous journey through the dark and wretched period of slavery, acting as almost as the slavery’s version of The Diary of Anne Frank. Douglass, a former slave, had an utmost strong desire to acquire the knowledge of literacy—the ability to read and write. In Chapter 6, Douglass overheard a discussion between different white men speaking about how that literacy would allow the slaves to understand their condition and make controlling them a seemingly impossible job for the slave-masters to deal with. With this knowledge in mind, Douglass decided to “set out with high hope, and a fixed purpose, at whatever cost
“Learning to Read and Write” by Frederick Douglas, is about the author’s personal experiences and challenges faced to receive an education. Born a slave in Maryland, his original instructor was his mistress for seven years. While only being taught the basics of reading and learning the alphabet, she then abruptly decided to terminate his education, believing that this would only make him dangerous. He writes, “The first step had been taken. Mistress, in teaching me the alphabet, had given me the inch, and no precaution could prevent me from taking the ell (Douglas, 1845, p 101)”. After already being exposed to the power of knowledge, he became friends the poor white boys in his neighborhood, and bribes them with bread in exchange for reading
Frederick Douglass was born into the lifelong, evil, bondage of slavery. His autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, depicts his accomplishments. The narrative, however, is not only the story of his success. It is not simply a tale of his miraculous escape from slavery. Frederick Douglass' narrative is, in fact, an account of his tremendous strides through literacy. He exemplifies a literate man who is able to use the psychological tools of thought to escape the intense bonds of slavery.