These two autobiographical narratives, Life on the Mississippi and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, respectively describe the author’s younger life. As the prominent and talented writers, Mark twain and Frederick Douglass were recognized by their distinctive styles.
Frederick Douglass, as a former slave, lived an unusual life. In the time when discrimination to the black still existed inherently inside people’s minds, Douglass was considered to be not intelligent and had little talent in writing. The purpose his work served is to convince the people and to illustrate what the slavery was really like; along with that, another tough task was to prove to the audience that he was the writer and telling the truth. To achieve his purpose, he tried to be objective by appealing to
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One impressive line is “I was seldom whipped by my old master and suffered little form any thing else than hunger and cold.” As a the victim who was really suffered and tortured, he told the fact like a robot looker-on. As writing the narrative in first person, Douglass can easily show his anger and grief, however, he just used the unadorned facts and let the readers to judge themselves.
Contrast with the analysis of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass stated above, Mark Twain, unlike Douglass, shaped the subjectivity in the book as an important and powerful characteristic.“When I was a boy, there was but one permanent ambition among my comrades in our villages on the west bank of the Mississippi river. That was, to be a steamboatman.” His choice of vocabulary is pretty liberal but gives us a strong feeling. From the “permanent ambition”, the readers can accessibly feel the enthusiasm inside a young boy and his comrades, which a steamboatman is such a consumingly compelling career for them. However, you can hardly say this kind of expression in Douglass’s