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Rhetorical Analysis Essay On Frederick Douglass

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Frederick Douglass Rhetorical Analysis Essay

In the book the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, written by Frederick Douglass readers are given a walk through of his life dating back to when he was a slave up until the point when he became a free man. Throughout the novel, one of the primary things Douglass attributes his freedom to is education. “Literacy [was his] ticket to freedom from the enslavement of his mind and body.” Learning to read gave Douglas an incentive to seek his freedom.
Douglass was only able to comprehend the magnitude of his situation by learning how to read. “It had given me a view of my wretched condition,”(61) Douglass stated when speaking about learning to read. To give someone a view refers to allowing …show more content…

Unlawful means that it is against the law. Things that are against the law are usually bad and unfavorable. Readers can infer that the only reason that teaching a slave to read was unlawful is because illiteracy keeps the slaves in chains. It keeps them tapered down and controllable. If a slave was to be taught how to read, she or he would start taking in new ideas (such as freedom). The person will be able to decipher that they do not need to continue living in their current situation. When someone has a decent education, they can think outside of what they know. In Douglass case, when he read the book The Columbian Orator he learned that freedom is a possibility. By furthering his education he learned that freedom is attainable. His mind became filled with ideas and his physical self became motivated to reach his goal of attaining freedom.
Using his case as as example, it becomes clear that if slaves are taught to read, they will want more than they have. They will seek freedom, thus dismantling slavery because the entire point of slavery was to keep the slaves bonded so that there entire family tree will only know one thing (that one thing being slavery). It is clear that outlawing teaching a slave to read shows the significance of literacy because when Douglass learned how to read, his ways of thinking changed and his situation disgusted him to the point of thinking of committing

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