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Frederick Douglasss Hope For Freedom Rhetorical Analysis

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Frederick Douglass’s Hope for Freedom Hope and fear, two contradictory emotions that influence us all, convicted Frederick Douglass to choose life over death, light over darkness, and freedom over sin. Douglass, in Chapter ten, pages thirty-seven through thirty-nine, of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, utilizes various rhetorical techniques and tone shifts to convey his desperation to find hope in this time of misery and suffering. Mr. Covey, who Douglass has been sent to by his master to be broken, has succeeded in nearly tearing all of Douglass’s dreams of freedom away from him. To expound on his desires to escape, Douglass presents boats as something that induces joy to most but compels slaves to feel terror. Given the multiple uses of repetition, antithesis, indirect tone shifts, and various other rhetorical techniques, we can see Douglass relaying to his audience the hardships of slavery through ethos, the disheartening times that slavery brings, and his breakthrough of determination to obtain freedom. Douglass’s opening in this particular …show more content…

He calls out his own literary technique, which is an “apostrophe”, that we see being exercised various times in this passage (38). “You are loosed from your mooring, and are free” is the first example of an apostrophe being utilized to express Douglass’s burning desire to become free (38). He is directly talking to the boat while indirectly communicating to his audience. If these were directed at his audience, they would be taken offensively, hence why Douglass puts ships in their place. He subsequently describes ships as, “freedom’s swift-winged angels, that fly around the world” (38). This other example of an apostrophe and a metaphor conveys the jealousy of Douglass to want to be free as the boat is free. Douglass compares freedmen to the boat and how he too wishes he could be like the

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The quote dignifies Douglass as a man, additionally it depicts the idea of how he was able to regain liberty and enjoy the life, which was ahead of

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Christianity was, to the slaves of America, (something with a double meaning). In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave, Frederick Douglass, the author, argues about how Christianity can mean one thing to a free white man and something completely different to a black slave. The slave owners follow the ‘Christianity of the Land’ while the slaves follow the ‘Christianity of Christ.’ Frederick begins to build his credibility to a, white, northern, audience by including documents from trustworthy writers and by getting into personal experiences through his writing. Throughout the narrative, he is articulate in how he writes, and it shows the reader that he is well educated.

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“God helping me, I will. It cannot be that I shall live and die a slave. I will take to the waters”(Douglass 77). This sentence shows insight to Douglass’s need for life. HisHim wanting to “take to the waters” is mentioned throughout the book.

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‘’ The head, neck, and shoulders of Mary were literally cut to pieces.’’ (page 38). Douglass appeals to the audience by using imagery in a visualizing way, to give the audience a way to imagine it in their head, to see the hurtful things that went on. The use of imagery from Douglass displayed how slavery was heartbroken. Along with paradox and imagery Douglass uses parallelism to describe how slavery was inhuman by expressing how slaves was frequently whipped.

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In “The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”, Douglass narrates in detail the oppressions he went through as a slave before winning his freedom. In the narrative, Douglass gives a picture about the humiliation, brutality, and pain that slaves go through. We can evidently see that Douglass does not want to describe only his life, but he uses his personal experiences and life story as a tool to rise against slavery. He uses his personal life story to argue against common myths that were used to justify the act of slavery. Douglass invalidated common justification for slavery like religion, economic argument and color with his life story through his experiences torture, separation, and illiteracy, and he urged for the end of slavery.

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The autobiography, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, written in 1845 in Massachusetts, narrates the evils of slavery through the point of view of Frederick Douglass. Frederick Douglass is a slave who focuses his attention into escaping the horrors of slavery. He articulates his mournful story to anyone and everyone, in hopes of disclosing the crimes that come with slavery. In doing so, Douglass uses many rhetorical strategies to make effective arguments against slavery. Frederick Douglass makes a point to demonstrate the deterioration slavery yields from moral, benevolent people into ruthless, cold-hearted people.

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To show his perception on the very cruel slaveholders, Douglass uses a multitude of adjectives to create an image in his reader’s mind, while also using metaphors to better comprehend the situation. For example, Douglass stated, “No words, no tears, no prayers, for his gory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody purpose.” By using this metaphor, Frederick Douglass made the reader question how one could be so cruel to another human being. By visualizing one whipping another without any guilt, it makes the audience understand the inhumanity of slavery. In total, this metaphor creates a agonizing image in the reader’s

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After spending much time with the Auld family, Douglass went to work for a new slave owner named Covey. Covey was known to break enslaved peoples’ spirits so they can be a “good” slave. The new owner did just that. All of Douglass’s hope to escape to freedom was gone. “My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed…”(Pg.18 E.4)

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