On Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass

(Note: My summer school students are working on a rhetorical analysis of a passage from the 1988 AP English Language exam. The passage comes from Chapter 11 of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave, Written by Himself. Here are some of my thoughts...)

As long as there is slavery, there can be no rest for the slave. Even after he escapes to the freedom of the North, he is still a slave to the fears of being caught and returned to a slave breaker such as Mr. Covey. He is, therefore, caught between two emotions, great joy and great fear. In this passage, Douglass’s figures of speech and syntax reveal this vacillation between “the blessedness of freedom” (1) and the feeling of being surrounded by “money-loving kidnappers” (17).

Douglass’s use of allusion, especially, shows both his joy at being free and the despair of living in fear of the fugitive slave laws. Douglass compares himself to an “unarmed mariner” rescued “from the pursuit of a pirate” (8-9). This simile conveys something of the relief he must feel, but it also refers to the original draft of the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson, though a slave-holder, wrote that King George, by engaging in the slave trade, had “waged war against human nature itself” in a practice Jefferson called “piratical warfare.” Although Douglass feels relieved to have escaped the pirates of the American South, he realizes that he is not truly safe yet. As long as the law allows—and eve rewards—the return of the fugitive slave to his piratical masters, Douglass is in danger of being snatched from freedom at any moment by “hideous crocodile[s]” (24) and other “monsters of the deep” (32).

In a similar fashion, Douglass compares himself to Daniel, who escaped unscathed from a lions’ den because he was blessed by God. Douglass “felt like one who had escaped a den of hungry lions” (10-1), but it seems that even the blessing of God is not enough for the fugitive slave in America, for he is still surrounded on every side by “the ferocious beasts of the forest” (18). Even though he has escaped the horrors of slavery, he has become a slave to his fears of being returned.

The combination of joy and fear—what Douglass describes as “the blessedness of freedom” and “the wretchedness of slavery” (1)—drives Douglass to become frantic. Although free, he has become a prisoner in his freedom, and his syntax demonstrates his troubled mental condition. The flowing, lengthy sentences that fill the rest of Douglass’s autobiography here disintegrate into breathless phrases punctuated by dashes, showing the panic that Douglass must feel as he sees a potential kidnapper in every man.

This fear is ironic, of course, because one would expect a slave who gains his freedom to find happiness and peace. But there is no easy conclusion to Douglass’s tale, for he is both free and slave, both blessed and cursed. Throughout the passage, Douglass juxtaposes the plenty of the American North with the desolation he feels. In a series of parallel constructions, he emphasizes this land of freedom and prosperity—a land filled with “home[s]” (25), “friends” (25), “shelter” (26) and “bread” (26)—is in fact a land where the fugitive slave is utterly alone and left to suffer “the terrible gnawings of hunger” (29-30).

Douglass shows us this contrast between freedom slavery and slavery in freedom to make a powerful political argument. As long as there is slavery in America, as long as those in the Northern states are unwilling to make no compromise with slavery, there cannot be true freedom. The freed slave is not free, driven to paranoia and beset on all sides by men who cannot be his friends because he fears they might be the ally of his greatest enemy.