Frederick Douglass Rhetorical Analysis Essay

The Narrative of The Life of Frederick Douglass, An American slave takes a look at how it really feels like to be a slave. There is only so much you can learn about slavery in the textbooks. Often times we know what slavery is, but never really understand how brutal it was for the slaves. Douglas shares his experiences to help us learn how slaves exactly were treated. Douglass emphasizes his writing in a unique style to capture the audience, while also reeling in their emotions to embrace the experience of being a slave, and uses an effective tone to illustrate what being a slave feels like.

The main focus of the essay is to show how the slaves were really treated. In the first chapter Douglass starts off simple, and tells how he didnt really

He uses a lot of run-on sentences to provide the reader with a clear image of the atrocities of slavery and all that they were deprived of. In this first chapter he focus his attention on showing how gruesome it really was for these salves. He makes it known that the life slaves went through is very different than what they teach you in the textbooks. He illustrates how whites were treated so much better, and slaves were just there. In one quote he talks about something so simple as age ““White children could tell their ages. I could not tell why I ought to be deprived the same privilege”. (Douglas,47). This quote relates to the sections idea of ways that slaves were dehumanized by Whites to become more animal like and less human like, this quote gives an example of one of the many ways that slaves were deprived of their human rights with something as common as age. He presents this quote in a matter of fact tone, not blaming anyone, but showing how much the whites were treated better where as he got nothing-not even age.To them, religious and economic arguments had demonstrated that blacks were much inferior to whites and belonged as an enslaved labor force. They were

His style of writing he uses is very straightforward. He wants you to understand him, so he tells it like it is. Often times he speaks informally as if it were just you and him, making the read more personal like a talk with a friend. At some parts he will get into detail , and show his sophisticated language that he knows. When he speaks of cruel times he uses more sophisticated language, and you really feel like you are there because of the imagery he provides. “ I remember the first time I ever witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I never shall forget it whilst I remember anything. It was the first of a long series of such outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and a participant. It struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it,”(Douglass, 51). He uses advanced vocabulary to illustrate that this happened as a kid,but now as learned to use sophisticated language as an adult. He often tries to show how mucch he learned of english as a kid, as you would imagine to be that literit as a slave.At the end of the quote, he reminds us that no matter how powerful a writer he might be, language cannot quite capture the trauma of the experience. The author often