Essay On Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass Figurative Language

As part of the history of the United States, a large amount of people were unfairly forced into slavery with appalling conditions. Slaves were barely considered people, much less allowed natural rights. Abolitionists and former slaves worked towards a United States without slavery through protests and written documents. One former slave who protested through writing was Frederick Douglass. With his book, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Douglass describes the hardships as a slave, invoking sympathy and commiseration through his sincerity and prowess. To increase his credibility, Frederick Douglass uses neutral, straightforward language and concrete facts, with which readers cannot argue. His sincerity combined with his limited usage of figurative language gives his writing authenticity and keeps it real. An example of his usage of concrete facts resides in the first few paragraphs of the excerpt of his narrative, in which Douglass wrote, “I had been at my new home but one week before Mr. Covey gave me a very severe whipping, cutting my back, causing the

His usage of figurative language and stark, tangible emotions invoke sympathy and commiseration from his readers. An example of this resides in the last few paragraphs of the excerpt of his narrative, in which Douglass wrote, “It was a glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom” (Douglass 547). Another writer who did not experience the hardships of a slave would not have been capable of portraying the same emotions with an adequate amount of understanding. Douglass’s poetic language, including parallelism and metaphors comparing slavery and freedom, further exposed the truth behind slavery, proving that he could not have simply fabricated this narrative and persuading others to take action as