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12 Years A Slave Essay

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Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup
The nonfiction book I read over the summer is Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup. Over the summer, I was at home with nothing to watch on T.V. While I was scrolling through channels, I noticed that the movie adaptation of the book was on T.V. I decided to watch it to see whether or not it was good. The movie was so emotionally captivating to me that I decided to read the book to get a deeper understanding and more in-depth account of Solomon Northup’s life as a slave for twelve years.
I found Northup very admirable throughout the book. He never gave up and constantly was showing how terrible slavery truly was. While many of the slaves he was with had accepted the situation they were in, Northup …show more content…

The book does not sugarcoat the difficulties and hardships of being a slave. My school textbooks taught me that slaves were whipped and mistreated, but they had never went into the depth that Northup had. I was heartbroken reading about the reality of slavery. When Northup recounts the lives of slaves he was on the plantation with, you get a perspective of how everyone on the plantation was being abused, whether it be emotionally, sexually, or physically. While this all was very saddening to me, I understood that it was important to include these hardships. I think Northup had to go in-depth about the reality of slavery in order for more people to become aware of how bad slavery was. Another reason I think every school should have students read this book is because it recounts slavery from two different ends. Northup’s short time on Ford’s plantation showed that some slave owners were not brutal and unkind to their slaves. However, the nine years spent on Epps’ plantation showed the brutality of some slave owners.
Twelve Years a Slave is a powerful book highlighting the saddening reality of slavery and is a journey towards salvation. We see Solomon Northup being taken away from his family and sent to live a harsh and difficult life as a slave. Despite this, he continues to persevere and ends up being reunited with his family,, which is by far the best part of the book. Northup recounts the side of slavery many of us are

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Before reading the book I figured it would be more a story line, however it’s in like manner to a documentary. I questioned if the book was going to mainly be about the hardships of slaves (which it mostly is). I chose this book due to my high fascination with slavery. I worship to learn about the hard times blacks went through (mainly slaves). I feel as if I’m not only learning more about my history, correspondingly I’m enlightening myself on how I could’ve been treated, comparatively what some of my ancestors probably went through.

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In Frederick Douglass’ novel he talks about the things he went through and the things he had to go through and the things he had to see . He talks about about how he was whipped how he had cuts all over his body from being beat. He talks about the brutal beatings he had to watch other slaves go through. He was beat for not listening and not doing things he

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He also provides how slaves were not having equal rights such as other people, some slaves wanted to get education but they could not only rich white people could. It shows how Frederick Douglass threw light on people who were against slavery such as the slave

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His “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave”, (Document G) makes emotional reading (lurid descriptions like "bitterest dregs of slavery" or "broken in body, mind, and soul" elicited reactions of disgust and dejection, which is the what abolitionists were hoping for) and showed that ultimately a slave, long thought to be a possession and less than human, was very much a person with reason and intellect. It provides unsurmountable proof that like any man, a slave deserved a life of dignity and liberty. His work shed light on the constant hard-working and abusive lifestyle that slaves

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The writer does not hide his contempt for those slaveholders characterized as “blood-seeking wretches.” (Twelve Years a Slave 125) Such slaveholders as Tibeats and Edwin Epps, another ruthless plantation owner, who buys Solomon from Mr. Williams, fall exactly into such a category. Nonetheless, soon Northup admits that his life on Epp’s plantation proves to be even worse than working with Tibeats. The writer notes that Epps never spares his whip to extract obedience from the “niggers.” Moreover, “being fond of the bottle” and various violent amusements, Epps repeatedly makes his slaves dance for him in the middle of the night or lashes them around his yard with his whip “just for the pleasure of hearing them screech and scream.”

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He uses a lot of run-on sentences to provide the reader with a clear image of the atrocities of slavery and all that they were deprived of. In this first chapter he focus his attention on showing how gruesome it really was for these salves. He makes it known that the life slaves went through is very different than what they teach you in the textbooks. He illustrates how whites were treated so much better, and slaves were just there. In one quote he talks about something so simple as age ““White children could tell their ages.

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The Narrative of Frederick Douglass is a very great perspective for people of today to understand what it was like to be a slave in the 1800’s. It tells the story of the slave Frederick Douglass and how he began as an uneducated slave and was moved around from many different types of owners, cruel or nice, and how his and other slaves presences changed the owners, and also how he educated himself and realized that he shouldn’t be treated so poorly It was at the point later in the book that I realized how some slaves might have felt during slavery in the 1800’s. When Douglass is sent away to Mr.Covey he is treated pretty badly but eventually he stands up to Mr.Covey and demands that he stopped being treated like an animal.

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I had not then learned the measure of "man 's inhumanity to man," nor to what limitless extent of wickedness he will go for the love of gain. ”(Northup, 21) His values and morals reflect how he treats his slaves and his overall

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All the terrible and inhuman things that Douglass describes are the practical and usual things that happened in his time, they are not extraordinary. His true stories and multiple details from his life give the reader an idea about the effects of slavery on the life of different people in the

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One of the most important scenes in the narrative comes in the sixth chapter when Douglass gets in depth on how his slave master reacts towards him learning. Unfortunately, it comes to the conclusion he risks his life to own a book, due to the fact that he was never allowed to learn how to read. Chapter six is alive with sympathetic insight into the unfortunate time of dehumanization. But chapter six is not the only chapter Douglass gets into detail

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Northup goes into great depth when explaining the daily tasks of enslaved people, which slows down the narrative and forces audiences to give their attention to this section of the novel. “The fears and labors of another day begin; and until its close there is no such thing as rest,” Northup explains to the audience, using a cyclical pattern while describing the constant fears. The sentences in this section flow into each other creating a sense of repetition and endlessness, which reflects the constant pain and fear running in the veins of enslaved people. Northup includes this image and description of the daily lives of enslaved people in juxtaposition to Ford’s direction of treating enslaved people kindly in order to get the most profit and labor out of them. On the one hand, Northup focuses on Ford’s kind treatment towards his slaves and Ford’s nonviolent beliefs regarding the institution of slavery, which makes a respectable argument for slave owners to treat their slaves better.

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His high level vocabulary made the book challenging, but it helped me understand and vividly imagine what the slaves went through during this time. Personally, the idea of reading about someone’s life was intimidating. I’ve never been the type of person to like autobiographies, and when I obtained the book I adjourned reading it because my mind set toward this book was that it was going to be tedious, and time consuming. As I started reading the book I became more enthralled in it, the way Douglas writes captures your attention. The part that made me want to keep reading was at the beginning when he intensely explains how his aunt had been whipped in front of him.

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In regards to the abolitionist movement, Solomon Northup’s slave narrative was particularly important because it revealed the inhumane treatment, such as the brutal beatings done by masters and overseers, the sexual use of slave women and the merciless separation of families, and in his personal case the abuse of the Fugitive Slave

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He uses these experiences to show just how unjust the treatment towards slaves was. As a child, he was not allowed to learn like many of the white children were, they wanted to keep the slaves ignorant

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It tells the tale of Solomon Northup, a free black man living in New York. Solomon is abducted and spends the next 12 years working as a slave. In this essay I will be talking about the similarities and differences between the text, as well as the significance of the text, the audience, purpose and stylistic and formal features (filmic devices). First of all, the similarities between the two films. There are a number of components that are similar.

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