Frederick Douglass Literary Analysis Essay

As a slave, Frederick Douglass, suffers many inhumane things that dehumanize him which begins when he is a young boy. In Chapter 6, Pages 41-43, Douglass recalls his childhood in his narrative, explaining what a life of a slave is in order to gain the attention of the people and to gain support for the abolition movement. His use of many literary devices such as synecdoche, irony, personification, parallelism and syntax helps him convey his point that slaves are treated brutally, and even if the masters seemed nice, they turned out to be atrocious, spiteful and didn’t allow the slaves get education in fear. When Douglass moved to Mr. and Mrs. Auld, Mrs. Auld decided to teach Douglass to read and write on line 2 of this passage, “she very kindly commenced to teach me the ABC.” He uses a synecdoche when Douglass says ABC’s rather than the alphabet highlighting his basic, childish, and underdeveloped state and education. Frederick Douglass experiences a revelation after hearing Mr. Auld rebuke his wife for teaching Douglass his ABC’s, “If you teach [a] nigger how to read, there would be now keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave. He …show more content…
He build suspense by putting the main clause at the end of the sentence, “the white man’s power to enslave the black man,” which explains the main reason slaves are being enslaved. His frustration is shown through the shift of the syntax. Douglass begins to use short, compound and complex structure, and as he continues, he starts to write lengthy, compound-complex sentences which portray how hard it was for him to get education under his enslavement. He begins to differentiate himself from Mr. Auld through the usage of antithesis, “what he most dreaded, I most desired,” which continues till the end of the passage claiming the different sentiments that leads to a pro feeling towards Douglass and his abolitionist