Similarities Between Mark Twain And Frederick Douglass

According to Steven Mintz of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History, by 1890, only 87% of all U.S. adults could read and write. This statistic has increased drastically with the United States’ increasingly efficient education system, allowing students today to read works and documents from centuries past. Frederick Douglass and Mark Twain are both well-known authors of the 19th century, and they both created individual autobiographies. Douglass’s autobiography explains his life, how he was a former slave, became an abolitionist, and advocated against slavery through written works and public speaking. Twain, however, described his life in his memoir as an adventurous young boy, fulfilling his childhood dream of becoming a steamboat

Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi and Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass are both first-person autobiographies written in the 19th century; however, Twain’s memoir utilizes colloquialisms and subjectivity, while Douglass remains relatively formal and objective within his book. Mark Twain and Frederick Douglass’s autobiographies happen to have several similarities, despite the individuals’ difference in upbringing. Both Life on the Mississippi and Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass recount their upbringings and the struggles they went through in first-person. Douglass utilizes the pronoun “I” to indicate himself as the subject of the biography, “The nearest estimate I can give makes me now between twenty-seven and twenty-eight years of age. I come to this, from hearing my master say, some time during 1835, I was about seventeen years old.” (Douglass, Chapter 1). This effectively creates a personal

Mark Twain is particularly expressive in his autobiography, especially when describing conversations between himself and other people in his life, “'What's that?’ He says, sort of pettish,— ‘Tain't nothing but an old empty bar'l.’ ‘An empty bar'l!’ says I, ‘why,’ says I, ‘a spy-glass is a fool to your eyes. How can you tell it's an empty bar'l?’” (Twain, Chapter 3). In this quote, Twain uses colloquialism in the words “Tain’t” and “bar’l,” rather than saying “That isn’t” and “barrel.” He also uses an idiom, “A spy-glass is a fool to your eyes,” a hyperbolic expression meaning that the man’s eyesight is sharper and clearer than a spyglass– a small, handheld telescope. However, Frederick Douglass does not use much colloquialism in his writing. The depicted conversations between characters in his life refrain from using many region-specific phrases, as seen in the following dialogue: “‘Well, boy, whom do you belong to?’ ‘To Colonel Lloyd,’ replied the slave. ‘Well, does the colonel treat you well?’ ‘No, sir,’ was the ready reply.” (Douglass, Chapter 3). Within this quote, there are no noticeable phrases unfamiliar to those who are foreign to the region Douglass was raised in. Not only does Douglass refrain from using idioms and colloquialisms, he also keeps his writing