Essay On Frederick Douglass Dehumanize Slaves

Rushi Varatkar Mrs. Daniel Period 3 Due Date: 4/1/2024.

Dehumanization of Slaves in The Narrative of the Life of Fredrick Douglass.

Back in the 1800’s, there lived a powerful slave who, not only knew how to write and read, not only fought against slavery, but wrote several novels on slavery, dehumanizing slaves and their enslavers. His name was Fredrick Douglass. When Douglass wrote his first narrative, there were ideas that stood out to many people. He lived in the 1800’s, and as he describes in the book, managed to escape slavery to the north and become a free man. Douglass met abolitionists who he was able to work with. After this, he wrote his first narrative, and many more to follow. Throughout his first narrative, he brings up multiple

In his narrative, there are several times where Fredrick Douglass uses pathos to show how slavery dehumanizes slaves and their enslavers. An example of this is his grandmother’s death. Douglass’s grandmother had to live like a slave, treated horribly, “And, to cap the climax of their base ingratitude and fiendish barbarity, my grandmother, who was now very old, having outlived my old master and all of his children, having seen the beginning and end of all of them.they took her to the woods” (chapter 8, paragraph 6). Douglass uses pathos to emotionally describe how sadly his grandmother was left to die in the woods, simply because she was of “complete helplessness” to the slaveholders. This shows how slavery dehumanizes slaveholders so much, that they leave someone who has always been with them for their whole life, to die alone in the woods. The slave was also dehumanized, as Douglass’s grandmother had to live in the wild without anyone else, and was treated like an old piece of furniture, which had to be thrown away, rather than a human, who had been serving the slaveholders for their entire lives. Another time Douglass uses this language technique is in chapter 10 paragraph 7, where