Narrative Of Life Of Frederick Douglass Essay

People always say that reading can take you places. For Frederick Douglass, reading opened his eyes to something he never knew about. Since Douglass was born a slave, he wasn't supposed to read. His master even said that he was “unfit”. Despite what his master said, Frederick eventually learned to read and when he did it had changed his. In the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, I have learned why he referred to his gift of readings as a blessing and a curse. At the same time, this excerpt explains to the reader why Frederick Douglass viewed his enslavers as “criminals”. Frederick Douglass recalls one major event in the passage from, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave. Douglass describes speeches from a book called, The Columbian Orator. The speeches in the book talked about Catholic emancipation. The meaning for the word emancipation is freedom. He wrote the speeches “gave tongue to interesting thoughts of my own …show more content…
He said, “I could regard them in no other light than a band of successful robbers”. In other words, Douglass saw the enslavers as criminals who stole the Africans from their homes and brought them over to America. He called them “wicked” and mean. After he read the speeches by Sheridan, he wrote that he detested the enslavers. Detested in the sentence means that Frederick hated the enslavers. At the end of the passage, Frederick Douglass wrote “I have often wished myself a beast”. This example shows how much Douglass hated being a slave and wanted freedom. By writing this, he meant that he would trade places with an animal over slavery. He wrote, “I prefer the condition of the meanest reptile to my own”. By being an animal he would be able to take his mind off of how terrible and hard being a slave was. After he read about freedom, it was all he thought about and becoming an animal becoming an animal would be a way to escape