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Essay Comparing Frederick Douglass And Richard Wright

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Everyone has had a sudden awakening or epiphany. One minute you don’t understand but suddenly a light bulb goes off. Just as if you are told a joke you do not comprehend. However, after some thinking it finally hits you. This is what Richard Wright and Frederick Douglass experience. So, the theme of awakening in both Black Boy and from My Bondage and My Freedom, after both authors gain knowledge. For example, Wright in Black Boy is awakened after reading the book A Book of Prefaces. “I was jarred and shocked by the style…how did one write like that…I pictured the man as a raging demon, slashing with his pen…laughing at the weakness of people…”. Wright is astonished and puzzled by the author’s style of writing. The emotions he’s feeling, make him want to learn more. By doing that, it will help him to write this way too. This is his start or gateway to his awakening. In a like manner, Douglass in from My Bondage and My Freedom is also awakened after reading. “I wish I could be free…as soon as you are twenty-one, and can go where you like, but I am a slave for life. Have I not as a right to be free as you have?”. After gaining the ability to read and comprehend things, Douglass starts to question the rights he has a slave and the freedoms he doesn’t have …show more content…

“He was using words as a weapon, using them as one would use a club. Could words be weapons? Well, yes…perhaps I could use them as a weapon…”. The book makes Wright realize how powerful words are and their strong effect on people. Similarly, Douglass is awakened after reading a book also, called Columbian Orator.”. …This knowledge opened my eyes to the horrible pit…Once awakened by the silver trump of knowledge. Liberty...”. After finishing the book, which shed light on freedom, Douglass’s fire is lit. The speeches and dialogues anger him but also push him to realize that liberty is something he could have and something he

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The feeding and clothing me well, could not atone for taking my liberty from me,” (Douglass 527). The author appeals to the reader’s logos by showing how Douglass was knowledgeable enough to be aware of his surroundings and realize he deserved more than to be a

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In this moment, by eavesdropping and allowing the words of his white master to fester in his soul, Douglass came to know how the white man had power over the black man. By knowing the information of what caused his suffering, Douglass easily knew how to reverse the suffering he was facing into the enlightenment that freedom from slavery poses. This is a profound, and thus efficacious, moment in the text of the novel considering the fact that it was the turning point from hopelessness to optimistic aspiration in Douglass’

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“I often found myself regretting my own existence and wishing myself dead; and but for the hope of being free, I have no doubt but that I should have killed myself, or done something for which I should have been killed” (p.121). From his learning, Douglass realized that his life will not be like the men he reads about books. Douglass started to see education as a curse and less of a

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Douglass was so determined to become literate that he learned in so many unorthodox ways that it made him a better thinker, reader, and writer. As a child Douglass got his hands on The Columbian Orator, which instilled an influx of ideas in his mind. Although with the spark the Columbian Orator arisen, Douglass wasn’t able to do much with it because he was unable to create a coherent answer or response to the questions and ideas he had. With the arrival of these thoughts also brought along heartache. He was a prisoner to his own mind, when he learned to read he got a rude awakening by being aware of his situation as a slave.

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Both King and Douglass were advocating for the same thing: their constitutional sanction of freedom. Both men, in their respective letters touch upon parallel thoughts and beliefs that revolve around the much bigger topic of racial inequality and discrimination. Both men were discriminated against and they talk about their experiences and plight in their very distinctive yet special styles. Born in the year 1817, in an era of open and unashamed slave trade, Frederick Douglass’s story begins as a serf to Mrs. Hugh in the city of Maryland.

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Douglass expresses in his essay, Learning to Read, that he truly realized the depravity of his situation by reading various texts about slavery that presented opposing viewpoints. “Learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing. It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy. It opened my eyes to the horrible pit” (193). Not only did Douglass’s path to enlightenment awaken him to the degeneracy of slavery and abhor learning how to read, it even prompted him to harbor suicidal thoughts.

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Slavery was the single greatest pivot point of the Civil War. In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, written by Himself, Mr. Douglass was born into slavery, but unlike other slaves, taught himself to read and think. He recognized the abuses that slavery brought with beatings, starvation and using someone, and that it also stole a person’s freedom to think and be. “No man can be truly free whose liberty is dependent upon the thought, feeling and action of others, and who has himself no means in his own hands for guarding, protecting, defending and maintaining that liberty” (Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, written by Himself).

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In particular, when Douglass learned to read he began reading documents that contained argument against slavery and in doing so, he became conscious of the true horror of slavery. He writes, “I often found myself regretting my own existence and wishing myself dead…” (ch. VII). However, he continues, saying “...and but for the hope of being free, I have no doubt but that I should have killed myself…”(ch.

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Douglass began to view reading as a curse more than a blessing; a way in which he felt more imprisoned by the slave state he was in. Thus, the more he read the more he began to detest enslavers; which nonetheless in his mind would be nothing but thieves whom robbed slave’s homes. For it was not only reading but his ceaseless mind getting the best of him; such reading would create endless thoughts which haunted him and made him wish that he would remain an ignorant slave. Nonetheless, during Douglass’s thoughts, Douglass began to learn to

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Frederick Douglass’s quest for truth and meaning in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass depicts the link between knowledge and freedom. As a slave, Frederick Douglass was abused by his masters and restricted from any notion of learning truth. However, his slaveholder’s wife tried to teach him how to read. When her husband discovered this, he became extremely upset and informed her that by teaching a slave how to read, he would no longer want to be a slave. Frederick realized that the perpetuation of slavery was enforced through ignorance; knowledge and truth would be the means to his freedom.

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At last, Douglass brings the point of freedom and justice the one person has every right to him than any other, and no man has the authority to rule over

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“I have observed this in my experience of slavery, – that whenever my condition was improved, instead of its increasing my contentment, it only increased my desire to be free, and set me to thinking of plans to gain my freedom.” Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, this autobiography was published in 1845. Frederick a prominent abolitionist figure was the first black “public intellectual.” At a time where many slaves were illiterate and prohibited to learn how to read and write, Douglass, despite being forbidden to do so by his master (Hugh Auld), managed to learn to read and write. His narrative has very astounding vocabulary which impressed many people.

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The Spirit of Life Freedom isn’t free, it’s an appealing mind concept. The human spirit is never free until the quality of oneself gain the strength to make it through every obstacle thrown at them. Frederick Douglass taught us to express the things that no one failed to mention within slavery. He had to master the negativity that dealt within him and the enslavement of all African American. In the Narrative of the life of Frederick Douglass uses his own personal experiences, a theme of identity and self-discovering.

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973 Words | 4 Pages

Because of this, he successfully creates a contrast between what the slave owners think of and treat the slaves and how they are. Douglass says that slave’s minds were “starved by their cruel masters”(Douglass, 48) and that “they had been shut up in mental darkness” (Douglass, 48) and through education, something that they were deprived of, Frederick Douglass is able to open their minds and allow them to flourish into the complex people that they are. By showing a willingness to learn to read and write, the slaves prove that they were much more than what was forced upon them by their masters.

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With this, Douglass is addressing the topic of slavery and whether to abolish it or not. And goes about telling the hardships he went through.

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