Frederick Douglass Symbolism

Frederick Douglass’, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is a condensed narrative that retells the story of Douglass’ life as a slave from childhood until his escape as an adult. Douglass’ life consisted of various changes that all contributed to the decisions and predicaments he encountered throughout his life. Although he was a slave, in Baltimore for the majority of his life, his descriptions and telling of how slavery slashes both the slave and the slave master are both thought provoking and quite upsetting. The beatings, humiliation, tearing apart of families, and the sexual brutality are all there, laid out in a direct, straightforward style that is somehow more horrifying with its lack of exaggeration. Much of this narrative

Perhaps not including how he managed to masterfully execute an escape plan and who the people were that might have helped him along the way were kept out of the narrative to ensure their privacy and protection so that authorities wouldn’t persecute. Another theory may be that the plan was actually shared with individuals by word of mouth but was just left out of the narrative to ensure that federal forces did not infringe upon the pathway to freedom. For a quick moment the reader might have felt that this journal of sorts might contain the answer as to how to escape whatever it is that is personally keeping them enslaved, but what Douglass can be perceived to be describing is that there will never be a clear answer that can be provided to help you escape your current enslavement. By not providing the reader with his detailed plan as to how he ended up in New York he’s able to, not only protect himself, the people who helped him, and the people who are to follow, but also in a sense made it more relatable to the population at large. There will never be a single escape plan that will suffice every possible predicament; you can infer that Douglass may have also left that portion of his narrative out in order to inform the reader that their “escape route” is not going to be identical as their neighbor’s. New York represents freedom and an end to