Narrative Of The Life Of Frederick Douglass Dehumanization Analysis

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The first theme that shows itself in The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is dehumanization. Dehumanization is the degrading of a fellow human's status to that of a lower being. Frederick Douglass shows that thinking that others were below them was the prevailing idea of his time by stating, “by the law of the land, by the voice of the people, by the terms of the slave code, he was only a piece of property, a beast of burden.” The reason this topic ties into the book so well is because the question that Douglass struggles with internally and externally is, if he is not a human then what is he, what is his identity? As an institution, slavery reduced men, women, and children to a state less than human. Dehumanization , according