Literary techniques are constantly being used by authors without anybody noticing how crucial they are to the story. Julius Lester used quite an abundance of them while writing Day of Tears. In particular the character Sampson, who is a slave born on a cruel plantation, is mainly described through literary techniques. His life was so rough that he decided to run away, but later came back after realizing that he had nowhere to go, nothing to eat, and nothing to do. Sampson was later sold to Master and Mistress Henfield, who treat their slaves very kindly; this gave Sampson no reason to run away this time around and he has learned to accept slavery for what it is. He goes on to have a child and a grandchild, but when his son Charles gets together with his fellow slaves bad ideas start to brew in their heads. Charles takes his family with their friends on a dangerous midnight voyage into free land, even after Sampson tries to stop them. Sampson has learned from experience of the attempt to escape and …show more content…
When Charles’s point of view is written, he explains that his papa (Sampson) would rather stay in slavery than escape because it would be too risky. “He say freedom don’t mean nothing but worry- worry about how to get something to eat and some place to stay and how to pay for the doctor and all like that” (Lester 127), Charles remembers his father saying all his life. Sampson wouldn’t say this if he liked slavery because then he would have no need to think about escaping in the first place. He also wouldn’t say this if he hated slavery because at that point a slave would do almost anything to get out of the awful institution despite the consequences. Using point of view explained that Sampson has always told Charles his thoughts on freedom and the fact that he accepts
Douglass as both the author and narrator in his novel took readers through his escape from slavery. Specifically mentioned in chapter seven of the book, the author expressed his new skill of reading and how that inspired his freedom. Douglass utilized rhetorical devices in chapter seven, such as pathos and personification to illustrate to his audience how his education motivated him to achieve liberation. Douglass’ effective use of emotion throughout the chapter made his experiences appeal to readers. Also, the first and last sentences of chapter seven served as bookends to show how education influenced Douglass’ freedom because within those two phrases there was a portion of Douglass’ journey told on how he escaped salvation. Lastly, Douglass’
In The book Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Douglass writes about how a slavemaster Mr.Covey attacks one of his slaves with a long rope catching him by his legs for no reason. This shows unpredictable his slave master is when he decided to try and punish him for whatever reason he think is a good one. Because of this, slaves were held back and lived in fear all the time. We see, though, that Douglass decides to take control of his life. Douglass want the reader to understand the control that fear had and admire the willingness of slaves to take chances for their freedom.
Bales and Soodalter use this to their advantage very effectively by using a multitude of personal stories from people who went through slavery. They tug at your heart strings by starting with Maria, who was 12 years old when she was taken into slavery for seven months by Sandra Bearden. During that time she was reportedly “ . . . dragged into hell. Sandra Bearden used violence to squeeze work and obedience from the child.” (722). Bales and Soodalter begin by giving you an emotional connection with Maria by telling a short story of her life growing up with her two loving parents, and small details of their house and living conditions. After the backstory is established, it goes straight into the accounts of beatings and torture endured by Maria, to quote “ . . . Sandra would blast pepper spray into Maria’s eyes. A broom was broken over the girl’s back, and a few days later, a bottle against her head . . . Bearden tortured the twelve year old by jamming a garden tool up her vagina.” (722-723). The inclusion of the tortures paints an image of how horrible slavery is, and evokes a sense of dread, despair, and helplessness for Maria. Bales and Soodalter not only state the tortures but they follow the text immediately by stating “That was Maria’s workday; her “time off” was worse.”
There are a number of key arguments in “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”. A few of which include inequality, education, and Christianity as the keys to freedom in terms of its true values within the institution of slavery. While Frederick Douglass made some key arguments, he also made common ground to make his appeal for the abolition of slavery.
In Douglass’s early teens he was no longer under the direct control of the Aulds. He was sent to a slave breaker named Covey. Under Covey’s cruel whip it was expected that Frederick Douglass would lose his “rebellious streak”. It was unnecessary to send him to Convey, but Thomas Auld was an incompetent master who had a bad eye for bad behaviour. Douglass told us that “Captain Auld [Thomas] was not born a slaveholder. He had been a poor man, master only of a Bay craft.” (65); this was a likely mistake for him to make.
The novel Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglas was structured around the hardships of Douglass’ horrific and dreadful life as a slave and towards the later part of the novel addresses his life as a freeman. With no dates to follow in chronological order Douglass classifies his life in a sequence of the masters Douglass experiences. The novel had a total of eleven chapters each depicting a different stage of Douglass’ experience of being a slave.
The Life of Fredrick Douglass shows how slavery could of not only affected the slaves but the owners as well. Thomas Auld was overall a cowardly owner and quite tough compared to other slaveholders. Douglass believed that since Auld obtained slave owning from marriage, it made him more of an unpleasant master because he wasn’t used to being around slavery and having so much power. Fredrick Douglass also was convinced that religious slaveholders were false Christians because they became more self-righteous and thought that God gave them the power to hold slaves. By telling stories to the reader, Douglass hoped to bring awareness to the harsh subject of slavery and show how the slaves kept hope during these miserable times.
In The Narrative of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass, an African American male describes his day as a slave and what he has become from the experience. Douglass writes this story to make readers understand that slavery is brutalizing and dehumanizing, that a slave is able to become a man, and that he still has intellectual ability even though he is a slave. In the story, these messages are shown frequently through the diction of Frederick Douglass.
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.
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.
Frederick Douglass did a great job explaining the harsh conditions of being a slave. In his narrative he spoke of the cruel things he saw and underwent while being a slave. Also, in doing this he shows the readers how his location(south) and dismemberment was a big deal growing up as a slave. He starts us off with a little background knowledge about himself .From the very beginning of his novel he made it clear that he didn't know his age, and that he was separated from his mother.1 This was something slaveholders did you separate families, regardless of their social status. He then goes on to say that the only time he saw his mother was at night, after she walked miles to get to him.2 To brake the bond between them two, the separation was necessary between slaves. He also believed that his father might be his master because slaveholders often impregnate their female slaves. Even though he was the son of a white man, there was a lot of distaste the children take after the status of their mother and his case is a slave. Which effect was great for the master because it increased his number of slaves, and the more slaves one man owned the more money he brought in.
Douglass's narrative is, on one surface, intended to show the barbarity and injustice of slavery. However, the underlying argument is that freedom is not simply attained through a physical escape from forced labor, but through a mental liberation from the attitude created by Southern slavery. The slaves of the South were psychologically oppressed by the slaveholders' disrespect for a slave’s family and for their education, as well as by the slaves' acceptance of their own subordination. Additionally, the slaveholders were trapped by a mentality that allowed them to justify behavior towards human beings that would normally not be acceptable. In this manner, both slaveholder and slave are corrupted by slavery.
Freedom is something many slaves never had the opportunity to witness. They were simply uneducated, illiterate machines who did whatever they were told. But few fortunate slaves were given the gift to be educated by someone. One of these fortunate persons was named Frederick Douglass. Douglass was born a slave. He never had the chance of knowing his mother. As mentioned before, slaves were stripped from their families, leaving them no sense of compassion. In the book, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass says, "Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of her death with much of the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger."(2) Douglass secretly met with his mother about 4 times during his whole life. He said he never really got to know her being he was only a child and the never had much of a conversation. These sorts of incidents happened to slaves throughout America and permanently scarred most slaves and their families.
Throughout the entirety of the book, Douglass presents himself as a neutral figure who can see both the negative and positive side of any issue, even slavery. He presents a rational account of why slavery exists and does so without attempting to discuss the morality of the topic at hand. Despite spending a lot of time discussing the cruel masters and supervisors he encountered in life , his anger is not towards those who support slavery, but the institution of slavery as a whole.“Nature has done almost nothing to prepare me...