Olaudahs passage is a story that informs readers about his life as an African American and what it was like when he was a slave. His story begins from when he was tied up and thrown onto a ship and ends with how he got his freedom. Throughout the passage, Olaudah uses different writing techniques to create sympathy for African Americans that British citizens can feel. For one he uses rhetorical question technique which not only creates a sympathetic feeling, but makes the reader feel depressed as well as uneasy. Another writing technique used is personification which creates a very eerie, upsetting morbid feeling for the reader. Finally the last writing technique is simile which brings a joyous feeling to the reader, but a sorrowful joyous. First Olaudah uses rhetorical question in this passage to emphasize the questions he heard other people state while together on a ship waiting to be separated and sent off for work. One of the rhetorical questions was “why are parents to lose their children, brothers their sisters and husbands their wives?” The feeling Olaudah is trying to get the reader to feel as I said before is not only sympathy, but to also feel unsettled. He wants the reader to read those questions and feel a little uncomfortable so that they really truly understand the pain that black slaves faced daily. Olaudah is trying to …show more content…
The quote “ I now wished for the last friend, death, to relieve me..” is a personification that Olaudah says because he is very sick and also tired of being mistreated. This makes the reader shutter because they read and realize it was so hard on slaves that slaves actually wanted death to come and rescue them from that hell they were living in. That quote not only brings the feeling of sympathy to the slaves, but it brings an unhealthy feeling to the reader which helps them to understand how slaves were