Frederick Douglass Narrative

Improved Essays
General McArthur
World Literary Types
Matthew Bardowell
12/8/17
Essay #2 The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is an autobiography of a mans life as a slave and how he became the person he is today. This narrative starts with Frederick as a little boy. It describes his experience as a child. Frederick did not grow up in a happy home. His life was sad and depressing. How he turned into the person he did without giving up is amazing to me. “Never having enjoyed, to any considerable extent, her soothing presence, her tender and watchful care, I received the tidings of [my mother’s] death with much the same emotions I should have probably felt at the death of a stranger.” In chapter I of the Narrative, Douglass explicates that his
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Douglass upsets this perspective by depicting the unnaturalness of slavery. He expounds the expedient by which slave owners distort convivial bonds and the natural processes of life to turn men into slaves. This process commences at birth, as Douglass shows in Chapter I, which describes his exordium into slavery. Slaveholders first abstract a child from his immediate family, and Douglass explicates how this eradicates the child’s support network and sense of personal history. In this quotation, Douglass uses descriptive adjectives like “soothing” and “tender” to re-engender imaginatively the childhood he would have kenned if his mother had been present. Douglass often exercises this imaginative recreation in his Narrative to contrast mundane stages of childhood development with the quality of development that he kenned as a child. This comparative presentation engenders a vigorous sense of disparity between the two and underscores the iniquity that engenders that disparity. Though Douglass’s style in this passage is dry and restrained, his fixate on the family structure and the woeful moment of his mother’s …show more content…
This ridiculous weakness is perhaps one of our worst instincts; is anything more stupid than choosing to carry a burden that really one wants to cast on the ground? to hold existence in horror, and yet to cling to it? to fondle the serpent which devours us till it has eaten out our heart? —In the countries through which I have been forced to wander, in the taverns where I have had to work, I have seen a vast number of people who hated their existence; but I never saw more than a dozen who deliberately put an end to their own misery.” Candide is the silly nephew of a German aristocrat. He encounters youth in the aristocrat's fortress under the tutelage of the specialist Pangloss, who demonstrates to him that this world is "the best of all universes." Candide starts to look all starry peered toward at the noble's young lady, Cunégonde. The noble gets the two kissing and expels Candide from his home. In solitude suddenly, Candide is soon enlisted into the furnished power of the Bulgars. He wanders a long way from camp for a succinct walk, and is pitilessly lashed as a deserter. In the wake of seeing a repulsive battle, he makes sense of how to escape and goes to Holland. In Holland, a sympathetic Anabaptist named Jacques takes Candide in. Candide continues running into a turned needy individual and finds that it is Pangloss. Pangloss clears up that he has contracted syphilis and that Cunégonde and her

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